In today's digital age, many governments are pursuing smart city initiatives to improve quality of life for residents and urban governance. Anji County in Zhejiang province is a world-renowned bamboo-producing center, where the Oscar-winning movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was filmed. The county government has intensified efforts to spearhead digital transformation towards a smart county.

They have harnessed Huawei's technical advances to develop many modern platforms, including an e-Government cloud platform, a data supermarket, a data warehouse, an intelligent awareness platform, an integrated security operations center, and a unified digital asset management platform. These platforms enable the Anji government to coordinate governance of organizations at different levels and stay on top of market needs across the entire county. In November 2022, Anji County won the "China's Leading Smart County-level City" award at the 24th China Hi-tech Fair (CHTF).

A Successful Example of Digital Transformation

In 2021, the Reform Office of Zhejiang Provincial Party Committee issued a comprehensive strategy for the digital reform of Zhejiang Province. The strategy stated that mission-critical applications and data need to be integrated across organizations and counties to break down data silos and boost data sharing.

In line with the province's overall strategy, the big data bureau of Anji County worked in tandem with a digital asset operations company, a digital research institution, and other local companies to take concrete steps towards digital transformation.

They used Huawei Cloud Stack to set up an intelligent public data platform integrating applications, data, and infrastructure and an open-source modern e-government cloud platform managing full-stack assets and resources, covering IaaS, PaaS, DaaS, SaaS, and top-level applications. Additionally, they built a data supermarket that streamlines the entire data supply chain while keeping data secure using Huawei's data governance capabilities. This means a robust, shared data-driven system for Anji County to promise efficiency, connect data and applications, and boost innovation.

The intelligent public data platform merges numerous data locally consolidated by not only organizations in the county but relevant departments of the Huzhou city and Zhejiang province. It drives big data development of the Anji County and sets a successful example for Zhejiang's digital transformation.

A Dive into Cloud

Huawei Cloud Stack is a partner Anji County can trust as they seek digital transformation. It is a cloud solution provided by Huawei Cloud and has been used by over 700 government customers, a solution with the largest market share in China's e-Government cloud infrastructure market five years in a row. Anji County has leveraged Huawei Cloud Stack to:

Deploy diverse resource pools. Resource pools for compute, network, storage, disaster recovery, backup, and cloud security-related services have all been deployed.

Integrate intelligent services. Video services, AI-powered services, and block chain services have been developed using Huawei's microservice framework, container running environments, general-purpose components, and a DevOps tool chain.

Strengthen data capabilities. Anji County used all kinds of purpose-built databases to establish a data operations cloud. They also set up a data sharing platform to catalog, aggregate, and exchange data across a wide range of applications. Plus, they deployed a data governance platform that provides a range of services –like a data processing and analytics service, relational database service, and analytical database service– to turn raw data into valuable assets.

Deliver one-stop decision-making support. A decision-making support system providing data modeling, analytics, investigation, and visualizations has been established for government officers.

Diversify intelligent applications. Underpinned by the resource pools deployed using Huawei Cloud Stack, intelligent applications have been growing increasingly, enabling instant messaging and cutting administrative red tape for official document management, housing fund management, business management, WeChat-based officing, and administrative management. Cloud mailboxes, cloud drives, cloud websites, cloud desktops, and mobile applications have also been put in place.

A Myriad of Benefits

Today, Anji County has built a cloud management system that provides dashboards, a self-service portal for agencies, a single, unified view for managers, and operations and maintenance platforms. They also established a comprehensive cloud security system delivering identity authentication, access control, and security management of data, networks, hosts, and infrastructure. Plus, a variety of resource pools that can easily scale have been deployed. As such, residents, businesses, and government agencies of Anji County enjoy a range of valuable benefits:

County governance: The scalable cloud resource pools allow government agencies to deliver the right amount of IT resources when and where they are needed. A massive volume of data is aggregated and streamlined across agencies at all levels of the county. This breaks down data silos, promotes cross-agency collaboration, and further, enables big data to fully play its role in economic regulation, market supervision, social improvement, and public services. Government agencies can now optimize operations and deliver reliable, trusted, and user-friendly public services.

Improved quality of life: The established e-government cloud platform enables residents to enjoy digital services and modern conveniences. For example, they can submit applications and make service appointments online and securely access information remotely. A combination of diverse intelligent applications also dramatically improves people's lives by putting fast, user-friendly experiences and information at their fingertips.

Thanks to this cloud platform, government and enterprises spend less on infrastructure management and service offerings. Furthermore, Anji County is accelerating economic growth by investing in intelligent technologies. This creates more market opportunities for local stakeholders, like application providers, system integrators, and device suppliers, and creates more jobs.

A Smarter Future

Underpinned by Huawei Cloud Stack, Anji County's intelligent public data platform has created a robust cloud foundation to elevate government services and deliver better experiences to residents. They have further streamlined management across applications and systems of organizations at different levels in all areas. Anji County has seen improved outcomes and boundless benefits from digital transformation. Moving forwards, they will continuously leverage the cutting-edge technologies and extensive services of Huawei Cloud Stack to shape a smarter future.

Smart cities touch every aspect of our lives as we navigate the digital economy. Backed by years of ICT expertise, Huawei is continuously tapping into a combination of intelligent technologies in the cloud, network, edge, and device to spur innovation and lay a solid foundation for smart cities.