The key to creating any robust infrastructure is resilience. Today, business and consumers both rely on resilient architecture to ensure a high degree of accuracy and speed. With new innovations in OpenBanking and scenario-based finance, it’s vital to build resilient architecture. 

Huawei hosted a session themed "Non-Stop Banking, Resilience Boosts Intelligence" at MWC Barcelona 2024. At the session, Jason Cao, Huawei's CEO of Digital Finance BU emphasized that resilience is the foundation for everything, and elaborated how to build the infrastructure resilience in the intelligent era. 

Huawei unveiled a new model called “4 Zeros” which will redefine infrastructure resilience in the intelligent era. Developing these four areas will create the potential to achieve non-stop banking. The 4 Zeros are as follows:

• Zero Downtime

• Zero Touch

• Zero Trust

• Zero Wait

Though these 4 areas represent a world of possibilities, it’s worth taking an initial look at each one to understand how each area can help redefine resilience to boost intelligence.

Zero Downtime means having a system that allows for remarkable business continuity. Real-time payments have increased the number of concurrent financial transactions from thousands of TPS (Transactions Per Second) to ten thousands of TPS. As a result, traditional architecture cannot support a resilient system that can achieve zero RPO (Recovery Point Objective). However, Huawei has provided a multi-active MAS architecture. This architecture is key to achieve the five nines, which means the system should work 99.999 % of the time without fail.

Another key area to achieve Zero Downtime is a distributed database. Huawei has built a next-generation distributed database called GaussDB. GaussDB has been in development for over 20 years. In the last decade, GaussDB has been deployed on a large scale across multiple top banks in China. Thanks to its focus on security, availability, and performance, GaussDB has supported over 2 billion peak daily transactions since its launch in April 2022. This is the world’s largest cloud-native core development practice. Going forward, GaussDB will be an ideal choice to ensure Zero Downtime.

The final piece of this puzzle is storage. In 2023 Huawei was the world’s 2nd biggest storage provider, and Huawei storage continues to grow rapidly. An example of Huawei’s active-active storage can be seen with Riyad Bank in Saudi Arabia. Huawei’s storage has allowed them to achieve zero service downtime for three years.

Strong MAS architecture alongside a next generation distributed database and fast storage that enables always-on services means that Zero Downtime is now an achievable objective.

Zero Touch will be an important part of building resilience since networks are becoming increasingly complex. A focus on autonomous networks means a reduction in change errors and real time data means better decision making in applications like Huawei’s Autonomous Driving Network. A major capability is Digital Map which uses large AI models to have full visibility into the correlation of changes of networks, traffics, and applications in real time.

Huawei’s recent collaboration with a top bank has shown that Digital Map has achieved 88% faster troubleshooting, one-click simulation of application changes, and 50% faster risk assessment. It also ensures 100% accuracy in network configuration changes while reducing touch time by 90%.

These are promising results as these complex networks get closer to achieving Zero Touch as a goal. The next few years will see key development in Zero Touch, which makes it one of the core parts of creating resilient architecture.

Zero Trust is crucial for the networked world. Any connection means that there is the potential for a cyber attack, and some worrying trends mean this is a vital focus. In 2023 the number of cyber attacks on global banks increased by 520%. The loss caused by each data breach reached US$ 7.83 million. After each attack the average service recovery time was 16.3 days. Cyber attacks on global financial institutions have led to a loss of more than US$ 1 billion since 2021.

These alarming statistics have led Huawei to develop the industry’s first multi-layer ransomware protection solution. It uses network firewalls to detect a virus in seconds and Huawei’s storage air-gap can isolate the virus and prevent intrusions. 

Huawei has also upgraded OceanProtect, which is an integrated backup solution. New large-scale parallel algorithms mean that data recovery is faster than ever. Currently OceanProtect data recovery speed reaches 172 TB/hour, which is five times higher than the industry standard. This quick data recovery means faster service resumption for customers.

Countries over 40 top banks in nations such as Türkiye, Mexico, and Singapore use Huawei’s data security solutions that protect more than 100 PB of core production data. It is vital that these solutions continue to grow so that everyone’s data is secure and Huawei is committed to helping the industry tackle these new and increasing threats.

Zero Wait will be a key part of the experience in resilient networks. It’s the ultimate customer experience because real-time capabilities are vital in payment, KYC, personalised marketing, and anti-fraud tools. Traditional data architecture meant that data was scattered across various systems. The challenges that traditional data warehouses posed mean that new intelligent solutions were needed.

Huawei has developed a next generation Data Intelligence Solution with global capabilities. This solution combines all serverless architecture with data lakehouses and data-AI convergence. This next generation Data Warehouse Service can handle an enormous amount of data, can easily be switched to from other services, and supports full real-time upgrades. This DWS can store tens of millions of data records in seconds and query them in a matter of milliseconds. 

This Data Intelligence Solution has also been tested. Two thirds of China’s Top 20 banks chose Huawei DWS to build leading data platforms. Thailand’s largest credit card issuer chose Huawei DWS to build a unified data platform and speed up the transition from traditional marketing to real-time interactive marketing that serves customers better than ever before.

Future First, Resilience Must.

Together, Zero Downtime, Zero Touch, Zero Trust, and Zero Wait represent the future of resilient infrastructure for financial institutions. Huawei is excited to be at the cutting edge of these 4 Zeros and each forward development presents exciting new opportunities that will create a better financial system for everyone.