Hitachi Vantara Launches Application Reliability Centers to Boost the Resiliency, Performance and Compliance of Cloud Applications

Hitachi Application Reliability Centers for cloud operations integrate Site Reliability Engineering principles and AI-driven automation to modernize and improve the management and operations for cloud workloads by up to 25% beyond traditional standards.

SANTA CLARA, Calif. – February, 23, 2022 - Hitachi Vantara, the digital infrastructure, data management and analytics, and digital solutions subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. (TSE: 6501), today unveiled a new approach for developing, managing and automating cloud workloads that enhances the coordination between product engineering and operations teams and dramatically improves application reliability by more than 25% compared to traditional approaches. The new Hitachi Application Reliability Centers, an evolved portfolio of cloud consulting and managed services helps clients accelerate innovation by migrating, modernizing, and managing cloud workloads, reliably and at scale.

The cloud is accelerating data-driven innovation and business agility, but the complexity of today's cloud operating models is contributing to unexpected costs, outages and compliance and security risks. According to ESG, four of the biggest hurdles for organizations to accelerate operations are the variety of application types, the time to coordinate between IT and DevOps, security concerns and a lack of visibility into how their apps and infrastructure align.¹ To realize the full benefits of the cloud, new approaches to IT operations that enhance automation and simplification are required.

Hitachi Application Reliability Centers optimizes cloud workloads for resiliency, performance and cost by incorporating a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) focused strategy with application modernization and automation services. SRE is a software engineering approach to IT operations and our SRE approach automates and simplifies the software development lifecycle and workload management to remove unnecessary costs, risks and complexity associated with migrating, modernizing and running your apps, data platforms and infrastructure. The result is significant improvements in application availability with up to 25% improvement in the time it takes to detect and recover from faults, and 15% improvement in change failure rate, an underlying KPI that reflects the stability of releases and the availability of applications.

Hitachi Vantara's cloud management services are delivered as managed services through Hitachi Application Reliability Centers. Leveraging automation and observability, these Hitachi centers modernize IT operations to more effectively integrate with the speed and efficiency already existing in most DevOps teams. These geographically dispersed physical and virtual centers of excellence are where cloud applications are monitored and optimized by our professional services to ensure client-defined KPIs are consistently achieved. Each site brings together best-in-class frameworks, design patterns, automated tools, and people to deliver SRE as-a-service and 24/7/365 cloud management. The first physical centers will be in Dallas, Texas and Hyderabad, India.

"Cloud accelerates an organization's ability to be data-driven, and our strategy is to meet our clients wherever they are on their cloud journey to help them advance the modernization of their applications and IT operations with greater automation and simplicity. Achieving KPI-driven outcomes for cloud workloads requires a fundamental shift from simply managing infrastructure to managing the efficiency and reliability of the applications," said, Frank Antonysamy, Chief Digital Solutions Officer at Hitachi Vantara. "Hitachi Vantara's Application Reliability Centers and engineering led cloud operations enables our clients to achieve true DevOps by fully integrating operations with engineering. Our cloud consulting and managed services helps our clients optimize their cloud workloads and processes and frees up resources and talent that can be deployed in new ways to accelerate their digital transformation with AI, data analytics and insights."

For more information on today's news, visit: https://www.hitachivantara.com/go/all-systems-go.html

Hitachi Application Reliability Centers brings together the consulting and technical expertise from more than 1,000 successful application migrations and more than 2,000 people with 1,300 certifications across the top public cloud providers including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, IBM, Microsoft Azure Cloud, Oracle Cloud and SAP. Hitachi Vantara is a recognized Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Service Provider for Amazon Web Services; Premier Partner and Managed Service Provider for Google Cloud, and Gold Certified Partner for Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform as well as a Globally Managed Independent Software Vendor.

Hitachi Application Reliability Centers includes the following services:

• Cloud Advisory Services to Define Cloud Modernization Strategies: Hitachi Cloud Advisory Services are consulting services that provide a comprehensive assessment of each client's application portfolio to create a clear strategy for cloud adoption. By analyzing application cost, reliability and criticality, organizations can better determine which workloads make financial and operational sense to be kept on-premises or moved to the cloud, and which applications should be retired, rehosted and re-architected to accelerate innovation.
• AI-Driven Accelerators and Observability: Powered by AI, Hitachi's Application Reliability Centers leverage 360-degree observability to provide smarter insights into the health of cloud services and automate root-cause analysis and issue remediation to deliver up to 25% improvement in mean time to detect (MTTD) and mean time to recover (MTTR).
• SRE Strategies and Management: SRE frameworks extend the engagement between DevOps, product development and IT operations to create consistent focus on organizational service level objectives (SLO). Using SRE KPIs and principles (fault tolerances, error budgets and a common backlog), IT teams can better collaborate to establish and meet their organization's SLOs and goals for application and data performance, governance, compliance, and cost. The combination of these strategies with integrated release management can yield up to 15% improvement in change failure rates.
• Resilience Engineering Services: Our services engineer resiliency into workloads through fault-awareness, fault-tolerance and self-healing capabilities. The adoption of failure identification and prevention strategies such as Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) for IT systems further bolster workload resilience. We validate resilience through various chaos engineering techniques and integrate them with any existing CI/CD pipelines. Resilience engineering services cater to addressing failures across the dimensions of load, latency, fault and data.
• Application Modernization and Migration: Hitachi has implemented SRE principles into its Application Modernization services to help organizations modernize applications for innovation, performance and cost-optimization. The portfolio of proven blueprints and accelerators have helped hundreds of clients build, deploy and modernize applications for the cloud.
• Cloud Consumption FinOps Services: The introduction of Hitachi Application Reliability Centers builds on the September 2021 launch of Cloud FinOps Services. Hitachi Vantara's FinOps consulting services assess clients' cloud consumption costs relative to benchmarks and identify areas where costs can be optimized delivering average savings of 30%.

Industry Analyst Research Underscores Challenges of Cloud Modernization

The race to adopt cloud services has added complexity and costs to IT organizations, as well as increasing application downtime, causing compliance issues and workload sprawl across public, private, hybrid and distributed cloud ecosystems:

As noted in a recent report by 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence report², nearly three-quarters of organizations report moderate or high levels of complexity in their current IT estates, with challenges around tech debt, application modernization, compliance and data management. In addition to upskilling existing personnel and bringing in new hires, companies are also looking at automation and managed services to help overcome skills shortages.

Client Insights

"A modern, cloud-based platform was a requirement for us to be ready for open banking. Hitachi Vantara's cloud migration expertise and resources helped us architect and automate delivery of a compliant cloud-native Banking as a Service (BaaS) platform. Their ongoing managed services are enabling us to focus on our vision for a reliable, scalable customer experience," Michael Swan, VP, Research and Development, Portfolio+

Availability
Hitachi Application Reliability Centers are available now from Hitachi Vantara.

Additional Resources

• BLOG: Accelerating the Data-Driven Enterprise
• BLOG: Cloud Management for the Modern Workload
• BLOG: Management Services for a Touchless Cloud
• VIDEO: Real Digital. Real Talk. The Magic of SRE
• BLOG: ESG Global: 4 Rules for Architecting IT in the Distributed Cloud Era

¹ Source: ESG Research Report, Distributed Cloud Series: Observability, Jan. 2022

² Source: 451 Research, part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, Voice of the Enterprise: Cloud, Hosting & Managed Services, Organizational Dynamics 2022

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About Hitachi Vantara
Hitachi Vantara, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd., guides our customers from what's now to what's next by solving their digital challenges. Working alongside each customer, we apply our unmatched industrial and digital capabilities to their data and applications to benefit both business and society. More than 80% of the Fortune 100 trust Hitachi Vantara to help them develop new revenue streams, unlock competitive advantages, lower costs, enhance customer experiences, and deliver social and environmental value. Visit us at www.hitachivantara.com.

About Hitachi, Ltd.
Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE: 6501), headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, is focused on its Social Innovation Business that combines information technology (IT), operational technology (OT) and products. The company's consolidated revenues for fiscal year 2020 (ended March 31, 2021) totaled 8,729.1 billion yen ($78.6 billion), with 871 consolidated subsidiaries and approximately 350,000 employees worldwide. Hitachi is working to increase social, environmental and economic value for its customers across six domains; IT, Energy, Industry, Mobility, Smart Life and Automotive Systems through Lumada, Hitachi's advanced digital solutions, services, and technologies for turning data into insights to drive digital innovation. For more information on Hitachi, please visit the company's website at https://www.hitachi.com.

HITACHI is a trademark or registered trademark of Hitachi, Ltd. All other trademarks, service marks, and company names are properties of their respective owners.

MEDIA CONTACT
Victor O'Brien
Hitachi Vantara
victor.obrien@hitachivantara.com