Huawei reaffirms commitment to safe cyberspace at Cybersecurity Innovation Series and Awards 2023

UAE: Huawei participated in the 6th edition of the Cybersecurity Innovation Series and Awards 2023, held in partnership with the UAE Cybersecurity Council and with the support of Dubai Electronic Security Center in Dubai. This event brought together cybersecurity experts, industry leaders, academics, and policymakers to share knowledge and experiences, network, and learn from each other.

Under the theme, 'Securing the Digital Frontier: Exploring Next Generation Cybersecurity for the Digital Age', the two-day series featured expertly curated topics presented by global cybersecurity leaders along with interactive panel discussions.

Huawei’s regional and global experts participated in various panel discussions and delivered keynotes on trending security topics. Song Haibin, Chief Security Officer at Huawei Cloud Europe, addressed the challenges and measures to redefine Cloud Security Governance in the Digital Era with 3Cs (Cloud Service, Cybersecurity & Compliance Standard) as a Unified Compliance tool. While Dr. Aloysius Cheang, Chief Security Officer, Huawei Middle East & Central Asia, delivered a keynote speech titled 'Cybersecurity Playbook in the Digital Era' where he unveiled a roadmap that could safeguard customers' journey to the cyberverse.

During the event, Huawei experts also addressed topics including the increasing frequency and complexity of cyberattacks targeting cloud assets and the challenges and opportunities of responding to a ransomware attack, including communication, decision-making, and stakeholder management.

Jiawei Liu, CEO of Huawei UAE, said, "Organizations that see cybersecurity as a business enabler can drive growth by inspiring customer trust and confidence. At Huawei, cybersecurity and privacy protection are our top priorities. We work with governments, customers, and partners in an open and transparent manner to tackle the challenges of cybersecurity. The Cybersecurity Innovation Series served as a crucial platform for us to demonstrate how Huawei is leveraging its technical expertise and global partnerships to better safeguard the digital future of the UAE." 

During the event, the UAE Cybersecurity Council released the "Future of Cloud Security in the Middle East" report in association with OIC-CERT and Huawei. Among other conclusions, the report found that cloud and cyber security professionals and decision-makers in the region rate cybersecurity as the key concern when choosing a cloud provider.

An exhibition alongside the event showcased the latest innovations in cybersecurity. At Huawei's booth, visitors explored Huawei’s cybersecurity innovations, including the Ransomware Protection Solution and the company's Cloud Security and Compliance tool.

The industry continues to recognize Huawei's cybersecurity contributions and innovations. Huawei bagged several awards in various categories at the Cybersecurity Innovation Summit and Awards 2023 UAE Chapter.

Huawei took home the Best Cloud Security Technology Partners of the Year in recognition of the company's continued investment in cybersecurity and cloud security capabilities, compliance, and ecosystem. By speeding up the development of cloud security technologies and services, improving the security of products, enhancing regulatory compliance, and cultivating a healthy ecosystem, Huawei has earned the trust of customers and partners through its efforts to help them mitigate and reduce cloud security risks.

Combining its 20+ years of experience with systematic, practical, and intelligent security operations, global security compliance capabilities, and full-stack technical coverage, Huawei Cloud has built a full-stack security service system that features one security center and seven layers of defense. This ensures service continuity, data security, and continuous compliance, making Huawei Cloud one of the most secure clouds in the world.

Huawei also received the Cybersecurity Ransomware Technology Leadership Award. Huawei's first multilayer ransomware protection solution stands out for endpoint-network-storage collaboration. With three core capabilities — network-storage collaborative detection, response, and recovery — this solution is ideal for building a comprehensive security system that features two lines of defense and six layers of in-depth defense.

Huawei believes creating a safer cyberspace requires an industry-led open and collaborative ecosystem built on trust to orchestrate a synergistic effort in a public-private partnership. Building on its commitment to openness and collaboration for shared success, Huawei was the first global ICT player to join the Organisation of the Islamic Cooperation – Computer Emergency Response Team (OIC-CERT), a leading international cybersecurity platform and the third-largest national CERT organization in the world.

The company has proactively participated in the telecom cybersecurity standardization activities led by GSMA, ITU-T, 3GPP, and IETF. In 2022, Huawei submitted nearly 300 cybersecurity standards proposals to 3GPP and GSMA and partnered with mainstream security companies to ensure the cybersecurity of its customers and promote the healthy development of industries.

About Huawei

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have more than 207,000 employees, and we operate in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

Our Vision and mission is to bring digital to every person, home and organization for a fully connected, intelligent world. To this end, we will drive ubiquitous connectivity and promote equal access to networks; bring cloud and artificial intelligence to all four corners of the earth to provide superior computing power where you need it, when you need it; build digital platforms to help all industries and organizations become more agile, efficient, and dynamic; redefine user experience with AI, making it more personalized for people in all aspects of their life, whether they're at home, in the office, or on the go.

For more information, please visit Huawei online at www.huawei.com or follow us on:http://www.linkedin.com/company/Huaweihttp://www.twitter.com/Huaweihttp://www.facebook.com/Huaweihttp://www.youtube.com/Huawei

US-China tech war: Huawei counts on 5G-powered Tianjin Port to redefine its enterprise business to survive crushing trade sanctions

The road through northern China's biggest seaport in Tianjin cuts through two worlds. At the berths on the road's right, quay crane operators sit in cockpits 50 metres (160 feet) above ground, deftly manoeuvring cargo containers between trucks and ocean-going vessels, moving between 28 and 30 boxes an hour.

At Terminal C on the left of the road sits Tianjin Port's "Smart Hub", a fully digitalised and automated wharf where quay cranes, gantry cranes, stackers and forklifts are all controlled by a command centre miles away. Powered by Huawei Technologies' 5G telecommunications infrastructure, the smart port can move 36 20-foot boxes (TEUs) per hour, much faster than humans.

Digitalisation "is the industry trend, a direction not just for Chinese ports, but for all global ports", said Tianjin Port Group's vice-president Yang Jiemin during a recent visit by the South China Morning Post. "Our goal is to build a digital twin to Tianjin Port in the next three to five years".

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Tianjin Port is the latest technological showpiece of Huawei, as the world's largest provider of phone network equipment reinvents itself after nearly four years of crushing US sanctions, which have eviscerated its once-successful smartphone business and driven almost all its network gear out of North America, Europe and Australia.

The Shenzhen-based behemoth - with 195,000 employees on staff in 2021 and one of the world's largest research budgets, surpassing even Google and Microsoft - is now promoting the advantages of 5G-enabled digitalised services to modernise the backbone of China's industrial production in coal mines, ports and even hospitals.

The benefits of automation are clear. A staff of 200 operators and engineers can manage 1 million TEUs in annual throughput at Tianjin Port's Terminal C, about 25 per cent of the employees needed in a typical year during its pre-digital age. The future has more in store: artificial intelligence (AI) for predicting congestion, big data analysis for parsing traffic trends and driverless trucks - all made possible by the ultra-fast exchange of data in 5G networks.

Huawei made it into the US government's cross hairs when Donald Trump took over the White House in 2017. A security review ordered by the Obama administration in 2012 found no evidence of Huawei spying for the Chinese government, although deficiencies in its products' security threatened its customers.

Still, Trump banned the telecoms equipment made by Huawei and ZTE from being in US government networks in 2018, citing national security, and put them on a so-called Entity List of export restrictions a year later to deny them access to US hardware and software.

As the US stranglehold tightened around Huawei's access to critical technology, the company's smartphone business - which beat Apple to become the world's second-biggest smartphone maker in 2018 -came under tremendous pressure. Deprived of Google's Android operating system and short of vital components, Huawei sold its Honor budget smartphone business in 2020, one of the biggest drivers of its spectacular success.

Huawei then pivoted back to its mainstay enterprise business, opening up new data-heavy products and services for customers to increase their usage and dependence on its 5G telecoms infrastructure.

The company established so-called "legions" to spearhead the effort, a nod to the military parlance much-liked by its founder Ren Zhengfei, who served in the People's Liberation Army. These cross-departmental business units were established to help clients digitally transform their products and services in mining, customs clearance and ports, energy savings at data centres, smart highways, and the photovoltaic industry.

In June last year, Huawei added five legions, bringing the total number to 20. While Huawei has not disclosed details about each legion, the chief executive of its airport and road legion Li Junfeng said Huawei was hopeful about the digitalisation of transport.

"Airports and roads are also key infrastructure and it is difficult to expand in the overseas market. So we do not have plans for global expansion in the short term, but we will make some changes next year," Li said last November, according to the state-owned Securities Times financial newspaper.

For Huawei, hopes are high that such industrial infrastructure can turn into a source of steady revenue - at least domestically - although the company has declined to divulge the financial details of its showcase applications.

Huawei's efforts to forge deeper ties with traditional industries build on its past work with the world's private enterprises, leveraging its 5G connectivity and computing power to automate and upgrade various verticals, says Matthew Ball, chief analyst at the research firm Canalys.

"Overall, this is an extension of what Huawei has done for years, even before the US sanctions, particularly its enterprise business which had a strong vertical focus on delivering solutions across its portfolio," Ball said. "It's just that its smartphone business has received more headlines."

The jury is still out on whether Huawei can survive US sanctions, especially given Western reluctance to allow the Chinese giant future access to potentially sensitive data and network infrastructure contracts on national security grounds. The company has already undergone huge change since former Trump added it to a trade blacklist in May 2019, barring it from doing businesses with US partners without special permits.

Huawei's rotating chairman Eric Xu said in a new year's message that the company had exited "crisis mode" and was ready to go "back to business as usual" in 2023. The bleeding has been staunched after it reported preliminary revenue of 636.9 billion yuan (US$93.8 billion) for 2022, little changed from the previous year.

The pressure continued on Huawei, even after Trump lost his re-election bid. Reports emerged last month that Joe Biden's administration is considering cutting off Huawei from all of its US suppliers, including Intel and Qualcomm, which produce the semiconductor chips critical to the Chinese company's telecoms gear.

Huawei has been reporting its annual financial results since 2000, even if it is not subject to public disclosure regulations, a practice from bidding for tender contracts in public telecoms networks.

The share of China revenue in its overall business has increased from about half in 2018 to about two-thirds in 2021, due to a retreat from almost all overseas markets, including Asia-Pacific, the Americas and Europe, Middle East and Africa, according to its results.

Its consumer business - mainly smartphones and devices - has been hobbled by lack of access to advanced chips. At one point, Huawei briefly surpassed Apple and Samsung Electronics to become the world's biggest handset vendor, but is now out of the top 5. By the third quarter of 2022, it finally ran out of less advanced in-house-designed semiconductors for its handsets.

Huawei's carrier unit - once its bread and butter business of selling telecoms gear - has slipped as China telecoms operators gradually complete network upgrades. In 2021, Huawei's carrier business revenue was 40 per cent lower than in 2019 when China began 5G infrastructure installation.

That leaves enterprise as the only segment with growth, notching up a 2.1 per cent revenue increase in 2022, although its contribution was still less than one sixth of total sales. At the beginning of 2021, Huawei founder Ren told employees that the company must make cloud computing its priority, and personally endorsed the company's partnership with coal mines.

The company is developing customised 5G mobile base stations that are resistant to dust, dampness and even shock waves from an explosion for the coal mining industry. These devices are expected to support stable and fast upload of real-time data from unstaffed machinery, sensors and high-definition cameras, which would help China's most dangerous industry cut back on the number of people sent to work underground in the pits.

The mining industry would be the first to use the model where scientists and experts from different corporate departments can come together to find solutions to specific industry problems, Ren said in 2021 in the Shanxi provincial capital of Taiyuan.

Enhancing end-to-end user experience, real-time processing of massive data, and the operation, maintenance and management of complex networks will all become challenges for the financial industry in the future, according to a June speech by Cao Chong, the head of Huawei's digital finance legion, the Securities Times reported.

Huawei has also made a foray into the electric vehicle (EV) sector, with the high-profile launch of Aito cars, a brand launched jointly with Chinese electric carmaker Seres. However, competition is cutthroat in China, and Huawei ranked only sixth among Chinese EV start-ups with a total of 76,180 units by the end of 2022. The company has also forged ties with a series of carmakers offering smart car components.

The change in Huawei's business is visible to consumers. On the ground floor of its Shenzhen flagship store, a three-storey building with a huge glass facade, customers approached a row of Aito cars during a recent visit, asking sales representatives about vehicle specs and available discounts. At the other end of the show room, Huawei's latest smartphones and tablets were on display on long wooden tables.

While analysts are generally sanguine on Huawei's new enterprise business moves, the digitalisation push is not expected to result in a short term revolution. "The enterprise business should be able to generate rapid growth in the next five to 10 years," said Ivan Lam, senior analyst at Counterpoint Research.

But the ongoing threat of US sanctions remains the biggest obstacle for Huawei, according to Lam, especially for products that require advanced computing power like smartphones, servers and car components.

"Huawei has never treated existing sanctions as the last, and it has been preparing for new restrictions in various ways, such as adoption of domestic technologies," Lam said. "We expect Huawei to reap the benefits of these efforts in upcoming years and close the gap in key technologies."

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This article originally appeared on the South China Morning Post (www.scmp.com), the leading news media reporting on China and Asia.

Copyright (c) 2023. South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.

Arm’s Newest Technologies Aim To Cement Its Position As An IP Leader

At the Computex 2023 event in Taiwan, Arm announced its latest computing platform, TCS23. (TCS stands for Total Compute Solution.) The new platform boasts a slew of updates across the board—indeed, it’s the first time in a long time that Arm has updated all its core IP technologies at once.

Over the years, Arm’s TCS program has helped the company work with its partners to deliver a more platform-centric approach that considers an entire SoC’s performance and how both design and implementation ultimately affect the user experience. As such, Arm is always looking for ways to improve performance while also improving power consumption and total efficiency. This year is no different, especially as Arm is motivated by competition from Apple’s M-series chips and the anticipated arrival of Qualcomm’s custom Arm cores developed from its 2021 acquisition of Nuvia.

CPUs lead the way

Since Arm is best-known for its CPUs, it’s no surprise that the company’s TCS23 lineup is dominated by new CPUs. TCS23 includes the high-performance X-series, A700-series and A500-series CPU cores. However, Arm is recommending a new configuration for its three different tiers of cores; previously, it recommended that OEMs use a single X-series high performance core, three A700-series performance cores and four A500-series efficiency cores in what is known as a 1+3+4 configuration for flagship. With the introduction of a new generation of performance cores, however, the company now recommends a 1+5+2 configuration. This is because Arm believes that its new Cortex A720 cores deliver enough performance and power efficiency that more workloads should run on them rather than the A500-series cores. Arm is also confident that partners who continue to deploy a 1+3+4 configuration will still be very happy with the new CPU cores, as it is claiming a 33% improvement in Speedometer browser benchmark performance over the TCS22 CPU core configuration from last year.

The most powerful Cortex computer cluster.

The Cortex-X4 is Arm’s new high-performance core, which the company says it has already taped out on TSMC’s N3E process node. This is not the case with any of the other Cortex A-series CPU cores, but the X4 is also the largest and most complex core of the three and likely the most challenging to tape out. Arm claims that the Cortex-X4 is the fastest Arm CPU ever built, with a 15% increase in performance over last year’s Cortex-X3 which can be found in most of this year’s Android flagship phones.

Arm also happily claims that the introduction of the X4 marks the fourth consecutive year of double-digit performance gains for the Cortex X series. The X4 also brings Arm v9.2 compatibility for maximum performance and security as well as 64-bit instructions, which the entire TCS23 family of CPUs has. Arm also says that the IPC (iterations per clock) gains achieved with the Cortex-X4 enable up to a 40% power reduction on the X -Series, assuming the same performance as the previous generation.

The Cortex A720 is the new performance core for sustained workloads, with 20% more power efficiency than last generation’s A715. The A720 is also 64-bit and Arm v9.2 compatible like the Cortex-X4; the company claims it has better performance at the same power consumption as the A715. Speaking of 64-bit, Arm has also talked about the growth of 64-bit apps and its plans to phase out 32-bit applications. Arm has fully shifted to building only 64-bit processors and chipsets and devices such as the MediaTek Dimensity 9200 and Google Pixel 7 are already taking advantage of that.

In addition to the Cortex A720, Arm announced the A520, its new “LITTLE” core focused on efficiency and lowest power-per-area. Arm claims that the Cortex-A520 delivers a 22% improvement on power efficiency, even assuming the same process node, which means that all the aforementioned IP cores could deliver even better power or performance once they move to new process nodes in production.

Along with the new CPU cores, Arm also introduced a new DynamIQ Shared Unit 120 (DSU-120) that helps connect all the cores together and creates new cluster configurations that were previously not possible. This enables up to 14 configurations with as many as 14 Cortex-X4 CPU cores and up to 32MB of L3 cache, if that’s what you need.

Arm also talked about its CPUs’ improved performance for machine learning (ML), with the X4, A720 and A520 seeing 12%, 9% and 13% improvements to ML performance. When you take into consideration all the new cores, combined with the new DSU as a complete solution, Arm says that it expects an uplift of 27%, assuming the same process node, on the GeekBench 6 multi-thread CPU benchmark. That is a huge generational improvement.

GPUs, too

Arm is introducing its fifth generation of GPU technology with its new Immortalis-G720, Mali-G720 and Mali-G620 designs. In TCS21 and TCS22, Arm introduced the Mali-G710 and Immortalis-G715 GPUs based on the fourth-generation Valhall architecture. The Immortalis name denotes the highest specification of Arm’s GPU core technology and the one that comes with ray tracing. The new Immortalis-G720 delivers both a 15% higher peak performance and 15% higher performance-per-watt, partially thanks to a reduction of as much as 40% in memory bandwidth required. Arm derives a lot of the memory bandwidth reductions it achieves from deferred vertex shading (DVS), which also enables higher quality graphics without taking up too many resources, thus helping reduce DRAM power usage and increase performance.

Arm also talked about ML performance on the GPU side, claiming that the Immortalis-G720 showed a 25% improvement in peak performance compared to the Immortalis-G715, along with 22% less memory bandwidth usage. Alongside the new Immortalis model are the Mali-G720 and Mali-620, which are intended for use in more mainstream SoCs for use in devices such as Chromebooks and TVs.

Software

Arm’s multi-decade investment in software is quietly the company’s secret weapon for fending off competitors. Arm says that more than 45% of its engineering staff are software engineers, which tracks when you look at how much software investment is necessary across so many semiconductor companies. When you think about how Arm’s processors, whether CPUs or GPUs, enable so many of the world’s leading SoCs inside most of the world’s Android devices, it makes total sense why Arm would have so much involvement in software that enables its partners to make the most of Arm’s technologies.

On a related topic, Arm says that it is also working closely with Google to support Google’s many different APIs so as to maximize the capabilities of Arm’s partners.

Final Thoughts

Arm is yet again pushing the envelope of what’s possible for the Android ecosystem and for the vendors that supply that ecosystem with chips. This is especially true when you consider that the new 1+5+2 CPU cluster is expected to be 27% faster than last year’s 1+3+4 configuration on the GeekBench multi-thread benchmark.

Arm is facing challenges from many different directions, with competition from Apple and Qualcomm on CPU core IP as well as pressure from RISC-V from an architectural standpoint. Arm is wisely using its deeply entrenched software ecosystem to enable its partners to be successful within the Android ecosystem. However, I do believe that Arm must continue to keep its foot on the pedal for performance and efficiency to continue to stave off competition.

That said, I do think there’s likely to be less competition soon due to the constrained macroeconomic climate; I suspect that many companies will abandon fully custom silicon and instead look to adopt solutions that use Arm’s IP built with its silicon partners like MediaTek. Whatever the case, the rest of 2023 promises to be very interesting, especially considering that Apple and Qualcomm are both expected to announce competitive solutions to Arm’s partners using the latest cores.

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