Improving cloud management

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 Services 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."

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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 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 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 Services 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 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 optimized delivering average savings of 30%.