Hitachi Vantara, Hitachi Ltd.'s digital infrastructure, data management and analytics, and digital solutions subsidiary, announced a new approach for developing, managing, and automating cloud workloads that improves coordination between product engineering and operations teams and increases application reliability by more than 25% over traditional approaches. Hitachi Application Reliability Services, an evolving portfolio of cloud consulting and managed services, helps businesses accelerate innovation by reliably transferring, modernising, and managing cloud workloads at scale.
Although the cloud accelerates data-driven innovation and business agility, the complexity of today's cloud operating models contributes to unanticipated expenses, outages, and compliance and security threats. According to ESG, the four largest hurdles for organisations to expedite operations are the variety of application types, time to coordinate between IT and DevOps, security issues, and a lack of visibility into how their apps and infrastructure match. New IT operations approaches that improve automation and simplification are required to fully profit from the cloud.
Hitachi Application Reliability Services optimises cloud workloads for resiliency, performance and cost by incorporating a Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) focused strategy with application modernisation 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, modernising 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 modernises IT operations to more effectively integrate with the speed and efficiency already existing in most DevOps teams. These geographically dispersed physical and virtual centres of excellence are where our professional services monitor and optimise cloud applications 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 centres will be in Dallas, Texas and Hyderabad, India.
“Cloud accelerates an organisation’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 modernisation 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 optimise 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.”
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 recognised Premier Consulting Partner and Managed Service Provider for Amazon Web Services; Premier Partner and Managed Service Provider for Google Cloud; Gold Certified Partner for Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform and a Globally Managed Independent Software Vendor.
Hitachi Application Reliability Services 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 analysing application cost, reliability and criticality, organisations 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: Hitachi's Application Reliability Services, which AI powers, use 360-degree observability to provide smarter insights into the health of cloud services and automate root-cause analysis and issue remediation, resulting in a 25% reduction 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 organisational 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 organisation’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 Modernisation and Migration: Hitachi has implemented SRE principles into its Application Modernisation services to help organisations modernise applications for innovation, performance and cost-optimisation. The portfolio of proven blueprints and accelerators have helped hundreds of clients build, deploy and modernise applications for the cloud.
-
Cloud Consumption FinOps Services: The introduction of Hitachi Application Reliability Services 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 optimised delivering average savings of 30%.
Industry Analyst Research Underscores Challenges of Cloud Modernisation
The drive to adopt cloud services has increased IT organisations' complexity and expense, as well as application outages, compliance difficulties, and workload sprawl across public, private, hybrid, and dispersed cloud ecosystems:
According to a recent survey by 451 Research, which is part of S&P Global Market Intelligence, over three-quarters of businesses have moderate to high levels of complexity in their present IT estates, with issues such as tech debt, application modernisation, compliance, and data management. Companies are looking at automation and managed services to assist solve skills shortages in addition to upskilling existing employees and bringing in new staff.
