Eric Penot, EMEA Practice Principal – Hitachi Vantara.

Until recently, the Grand Duchy was cautious about the cloud given previous regulatory restrictions and concerns about cyber security. However, regulations have changed, and there is growing realisation that the likes of Amazon Web Services, Azure and Google are able to deploy substantially more resources to protect their systems than non-specialists.

Modernisation, transformation

Boosting flexibility and reducing costs while deploying AI tools, machine learning, businesses intelligence, data analytics and the rest is facilitated by working on the cloud. “Assessment, Migration, Application Modernisation and Managed Services are the core of our Cloud Services offering to clients,” explained Eric Penot, EMEA Practice Principal at Hitachi Vantara. Cloud Services from Hitachi Vantara is their dedicated service offering that seeks to help clients accelerate their multi-cloud ambitions, regardless of the technology (public or private) they wish to deploy or the platform they prefer.

Hitachi Vantara is indeed a multi-cloud systems integrator, managed services provider and solutions developer. Hitachi Vantara purchased the company REAN Cloud last September to boost its expertise in cloud migration, modernisation, and managed services. This multi-cloud experience complements the firm’s existing Hitachi Enterprise Cloud and on-premises deployment expertise.

Global and local operations

Having a concentration of specialised local expertise married with global back up is how Cloud Services from Hitachi Vantara seeks to differentiate itself. Sales and support teams work with clients in their premises, supported by 300 staff based in US, India, Western and Southern Europe, including a Brussels office. They are focused specialists, demonstrated by their Premier Consulting Partner status in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Partner Network (APN) and their Microsoft Azure Silver Partner status, amongst others. Complementing this are “follow-the-sun” 24/7 operations, managed services, technical development and support from teams located in the 3 worldwide GEO’s (US, India, Europe)

Other key differentiating factors are that Cloud Services from Hitachi Vantara are Cloud-vendor agnostic, and offer end-to-end automation to facilitate migration. Mr Penot says their methodology is 80% faster than traditional techniques, lowers risk and increases security and compliance.

Blueprint for success

Depending which of the Services is requested by customers, they can extract legacy application data in a “data lake” and create microservices to assemble (as opposed to rewriting) applications. Also flexible cloud migration “blueprints” are a key innovation which enables swift time-to-market. The blueprints create multistage transactional data for analytics and processing. They are tailored to meet the customer compliance needs of different industries and businesses. Additionally, they can be fine-tuned to meet specific customer’s needs. “This is done within our platform by using a simple drag-and-drop interface, connecting with the resources from the specific cloud provider and resources you choose,” Mr Penot said: Behind this is a smart back-end which writes infrastructure-as-a-code automatically to build the configuration clients need.”

This is supported by continuous integration and deployment processes, featuring a solid development and data operations capability. The platform automates testing tools to probe the robustness of browsers, security and more. “That’s what we mean by end-to-end automation,” Mr Penot said. Boosting innovation agility comes from this capacity to automate, to replicate, and to scale, using blueprints. The goal is to enable clients to build and maintain a fully cloud-native enterprise platform.