Building a Data Foundation for AI Is a Rewarding Experience

AI runs on data, and global enterprises are awash with petabytes of data. That might suggest that it’s easy for companies to advance their businesses through the power of AI.

Yet enterprise data is often fragmented across departmental and technological silos, and that data is often inconsistent, ungoverned and disconnected from mission-critical systems. As a result, many AI initiatives stall before they can deliver operational value, and the root cause is rarely the model.

Don’t believe me? According to Gartner®,  sixty-three percent of organizations either do not have or are unsure if they have the right data management practices for AI” and “through 2026, organizations will abandon 60% of AI projects unsupported by AI-ready data.”* Our State of Data Infrastructure Global Report also makes clear that enterprise data readiness and AI maturity have a long way to go.

• Less than half (41%) of organizations have resilient infrastructure with clean data powering AI-driven operations and measurable returns, according to our findings.
• About a quarter (24%) are clinging to manual processes that leave them unable to scale.
• The rest linger between the two, risking irrelevance with marginal progress.

At a time when organizations are investing aggressively in AI, analytics and generative models in the race to gain competitive advantage, enterprises need a strong AI data foundation.

For AI, a strong data foundation deliver scalability, reliability, security, governance, sovereignty, and sustainability. Here’s a closer look at what all that means.

Scalability

To scale successfully, enterprises need to align infrastructure choices with data strategy, do strategic workload placement and deploy scalable storage platforms that unlock the value of data, including unstructured data.

Our ability to enable all of the above with our AI-ready storage platforms, AIOps offering and Hitachi iQ, recognized for its best-in-class economics for AI analytics “especially at scale,” recently landed us on CRN’s 25 Hottest Infrastructure and Edge Computing Companies of 2026 list.

Reliability

Global enterprises need mission-critical reliability. We’ve got them covered.

Our VSP One data platform targets 99.999% availability to help minimize downtime while enabling simplified data movement and business continuity.

Security

Data movement creates risk. Organizations need infrastructure that lets them securely manage and activate data wherever it resides. VSP One puts data services under a common architecture, reducing risk and providing a consistent experience regardless of where data exists.

In naming Hitachi Vantara a Leader and Outperformer in the latest GigaOm Radar for Primary Storage analysis, GigaOm recognized our strong cyber-resiliency features, highlighted by a 100% data availability guarantee that ensures clean data recovery and reduces reinfection risk post-attack.

Governance

Compliance and governance are non-negotiable for large, mission-critical organizations.

IT modernization provides the opportunity for enterprises to streamline data governance and regulatory compliance with centralized storage and high levels of automation. According to proprietary research from Hitachi Vantara, this can cut compliance costs by up to 67%.

Sovereignty

As data sovereignty becomes a critical requirement alongside operational resilience and security, more enterprises are demanding sovereign-capable solutions.

These solutions enable governments and enterprises to deploy advanced AI capabilities while maintaining full control over their data, infrastructure and regulatory compliance.

Sustainability:

Keeping costs in check and managing AI’s energy usage requires modern data infrastructure that is energy-efficient, has visibility into and adjusts to power usage across the grid, and unifies the software layer across IT energy, cooling and building management.

For Turkey’s DestekBank, VSP One provided a 25% reduction in data center power consumption, among other benefits. It was a win-win situation for this Hitachi Vantara customer and for us. This real-world business impact contributed to both companies being recognized with a TMC 2025 Cloud Computing Excellence Award.

AI-Ready Data and the Hybrid Cloud: A Winning Pair

Modern data infrastructure employed using a hybrid cloud approach empowers enterprises with the agility to address security and compliance, adjust business models as needed, assess costs and drive cost efficiency, better optimize their resources, innovate and scale with AI.

These recognitions reflect more than product innovation alone. They reinforce the growing need for infrastructure that can securely manage and activate data across hybrid environments while supporting AI at scale. By combining AI-ready infrastructure with hybrid cloud flexibility and resiliency, Hitachi Vantara helps organizations turn AI investments into real-world outcomes.

We understand that firsthand, as evidenced by our Product of the Year designation from Business Intelligence Group’s 2025 Stratus Awards for Cloud Computing for hybrid cloud/AI solutions/applications, recognizing flexible, AI-ready infrastructure that supports operational resilience, scalability and real-world business outcomes. This award recognizes innovations in the cloud that accelerate digital transformation, drive operational excellence and power the future of business.

And isn’t that why enterprises are all investing in AI to begin with?

Learn more about Hitachi Vantara’s VSP One, a data storage platform that delivers a foundation for AI-ready infrastructure.

_{*Gartner Press Release, Lack of AI-Ready Data Puts AI Projects at Risk, February 26, 2025. GARTNER is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.}