PARTNER
3 ways Wifi 6 and the cloud are enhancing governments
By Huawei
Huawei explains how healthcare, education and water management improved services with greater connectivity and data storage.
For government employees, this frustration is compounded as citizens end up receiving sluggish services. The ability to connect to and operate digital tools is quickly becoming the backbone of government services.
A recent issue of ICT Insights revealed how three key sectors - healthcare, education and water management - were able to overcome significant challenges with their IT systems. It explains how Wifi 6 - a better, faster version of Wifi - and the cloud came in useful.
1. Reinventing healthcare IT
The first sector that needed Wifi 6 and the cloud was healthcare, when a Turkish university and its adjoining university hospital found that patients were generating massive amounts of data.
However, no insights could be drawn from the data as it was being kept in unconnected siloes across Biruni Hospital and its related clinics.
The cloud provided a single location where this data is stored and analysed. This means that patient data can now be studied for better care delivery, wrote the ICT Insights report.
Shifting to the cloud also reduced the number of physical servers required by the hospital and university. This allowed IT staff to focus more efforts on building new applications for the healthcare community and spend less time maintaining the servers.
The university introduced an e-learning video call system, hosted on the cloud, when remote learning became the norm during the pandemic. The cloud’s ability to seamlessly integrate this new system meant no additional investments were required, the university reported.
The university also adopted Wifi 6 to provide a reliable IT infrastructure for its new campus and 6,000 additional students. Students experienced faster download speeds and greater reliability despite connecting to an increasing number of devices.
The Wifi 6 technology also requires less wires and physical machinery, freeing up physical space in the hospital and university for other uses, wrote the report.
2. Wireless water management
The national water commission of Mexico (CONAGUA) faced IT challenges when monitoring water conservation facilities. The commission couldn’t meet the processing requirements of its new services, such as a weather app for citizens.
Water conservation also depends heavily on tech to collect and analyse data. This meant that the commission needed to address existing issues and prepare for the future by investing in a new IT system.
Huawei's Wifi 6 technology “ensures we’re always connected, greatly enhancing the office network quality”, said a member of the commission’s IT team. It has been a key step forward in digital transformation plans, wrote the report.
A new system for managing users on the commission’s network was another tool that Huawei provided. The new system enables IT staff to distinguish between employee and guest users, making the network more secure overall, the report states.
3. Cloud-enabled education
The UAE adopted a new digital platform to support its education system. But the platform struggled as information was kept in separate centres across different schools, meaning it couldn’t access some of the data that it was collecting.
The fragmented network also meant the platform was costly to manage, the report emphasised. The education sector concluded that the system needed to be upgraded.
Huawei’s cloud technology was adopted to upgrade this platform. By combining this technology with the existing system, data resources are now stored in one location on the cloud. This lowered costs and allowed for more capabilities, such as high-quality video streaming, big data storage and more intensive computing.
The platform’s data centres were also enhanced with Huawei’s flash storage technology. Flash storage is a cutting-edge alternative to traditional disk-based data centres, offering double the performance capabilities compared to other storage products.
“This project represents one of the largest investments made in the UAE’s education sector in 2019, and will strengthen the UAE’s position as a regional leader in educational services,” said Fahem Al Nuaimi, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Ankabut, the Advanced National Research and Education Network (NREN) of UAE. “Huawei’s technology enables us to offer cloud services to our partner institutions throughout the UAE, which makes the academic process more efficient, reducing expenses and boosting collaborative work, to benefit education and research facilities alike.”
Government services are a journey, and tech challenges are a roadblock. To prevent delays in delivering citizen services, public sector agencies must ensure their IT systems are ready to meet requirements. Adopting Wifi 6 and the cloud is becoming the way to do that.
For more information about how network and cloud is supporting the future of public sector, please visit Huawei's website.
Images courtesy of Huawei.