Management Services for a Touchless Cloud

More companies than ever have prioritized the installation of digital cloud-based technologies to establish a modern workforce and modern workplace. But as we head into 2022 with increasing numbers of workloads earmarked for deployment on private, public, and hybrid clouds, CIOs and other IT leaders face enormous new pressures to manage all these distributed workloads effectively.

However, if they’re going to thrive in this increasingly multicloud, hybrid world, Ops teams need dependable, always-on cloud infrastructures that will scale to meet changing work capacity needs.

For most organizations, that’s still a pipe dream. It’s even further out of reach for organizations with limited resources who can’t hire – or afford – enough skilled people to staff a cloud operations center while operating multiple cloud silos. The result: many hybrid workforce and business automation efforts falter or fail outright due to underinvestment in building IT/Sec/DevOps teams with the right tools and skills to operate in this new multicloud world.

What’s increasingly clear is that IT needs to find a better way to manage its cloud infrastructure. Just as self-driving cars can proactively detect traffic congestion to take a different route without requiring human intervention, we need workloads that will self-adjust. In other words, self-healing, self-reliant architectures that are practically invisible and touchless.

That’s why we’re launching our all-new Hitachi Application Reliability Service portfolio. You can read more about our offerings here but the thrust of our initiative will be to offer intelligent, autonomous and always-on cloud operations. In practice, we’re talking about the fully automated management of all workloads running in the cloud so customers can realize the idea of a seamless, resilient, and self-healing management system.

There’s More to Operations

Our approach to cloud operations is to ensure self-reliant behaviors from the get-go. It’s a recognition that CloudOps nowadays must involve more than infrastructure, operations and support; it also must be about managing applications, data and the various activities involved in optimizing workloads – like getting feedback from operations into design process, building the right automation to predict failures and being able to adjusting to it, all the while ensuring that they’re always available and reliable in a predictable way.

That’s a very big deal when you consider the impact of an end-to-end cloud management system that will handle everything for a customer from cloud deployment and management to monitoring and optimization – doing the job autonomously – on any provider’s cloud or on any hybrid cloud environment.

What’s more, an organization’s cloud operations won’t ever again buckle under the strain because they don’t have enough trained personnel to tackle the task of effectively managing workloads (defined as applications, data, infrastructure, compute, storage, networks etc.) through the lifecycle of build, deploy, run, and operate. Whether they choose to deploy their workloads on private, public, or hybrid clouds, they’ll be able to manage the growing complexity to ensure that cloud workloads and services are always available and reliable in a scalable and predictable way.

A Conceptual Difference

Many still think of cloud operations as “a series of actions” one must take after workloads have moved to the cloud with software-defined infrastructure or with hybrid and distributed cloud environments. At Hitachi Vantara, We believe migration, modernization and operations need to be intertwined – where DevSecOps and ITOps are working closely in an SRE led engineering approach. The goal should be a truly autonomous, always-on cloud operation that can self-heal, self-operate, and optimize. Modern cloud workloads need this modern approach.

That’s how we architected our new services: to enable organizations to design their environments in an intelligent way to run seamlessly. In the event that problems occur, they are not only identified but managed and optimized in an autonomous fashion where every new event is training the system to learn and become smarter each time, for the next time. That learning is then fed back into the design process to create a better self-healing architecture for future workloads.

This is what we mean by the phrase “end-to-end lifecycle cloud management,” – It helps eliminate one of the biggest CIO headaches – to manage the growing complexity and cost associated with these distributed workloads. Organizations that can design, build, observe, operate, and manage “workloads” seamlessly across people, processes, and technology stacks also stand a far better chance of reducing expensive downtime.

Getting Physical

Hitachi Application Reliability Services are available in different ways to enable clients to access them according to their preferences. For example, as part of this launch, we also announced the Hitachi Application Reliability Centers, a network of cloud management centers operating 24 x 7, every day of the year. Run by teams of cloud and application experts who possess skills customers may lack, HARCs will be able to build, deploy and manage all aspects of a client’s cloud environment.

For organizations who may not have the proper expertise in-house, Hitachi Vantara can embed personnel into their teams. This is especially beneficial for midsize or smaller companies that don’t want to assume the burden of people and processes. They can merely offload cloud management responsibilities to us.
Not only will we make workloads run better, but we’ll also provide insights and data to help customers tweak their designs to achieve ever-increasing reliability and lower costs.

In 2022, it’s clear we need to foster a new mindset and culture around hybrid, multicloud complex technology integrations and cross-functional teams collaboration in order to break out of a siloed world. There’s no magic wand to wave but by providing a constant feedback loop, our solution will make sure that design insights get shared so that teams know what needs to be fixed to create more reliable and cost-efficient architectures.

It’s a journey that we’re ready to help you make, together.

Related News

• Accelerating the Data-Driven Enterprise – The Vision by Gajen Kandiah
• Data-Driven and Cloud Ready Infrastructure – The Q&A with Russell Skingsley
• Cloud Management for the Modern Workload – The Q&A with Premkumar Balasubramanian
• Hitachi Vantara – All Systems Go
• Read the Press Release: Hitachi Launches New Application Reliability Services
• Read the Press Release: Hitachi Launches New Data Infrastructure Solutions for Private and Hybrid Cloud

Be sure to check out Insights for perspectives on the data-driven world.

Samta Bansal is Global Consulting Strategy and Marketing Leader at Hitachi Vantara.