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Drive Flexible Infrastructure Consumption, Automation and Orchestration for All

Jeb Horton Jeb Horton
Senior Vice President, Global Services, San Francisco, United States

January 31, 2024


Platform Savings for Hybrid Cloud

In today’s dynamic business landscape, agility, scalability, and efficiency are prized possessions. Yet, organizations still face numerous challenges including tightening budgets, IT enablement of new pop-up business opportunities, rising costs, cyberattacks, new technology adoption, such as Gen AI, lack of technical knowledge and increasing demand for innovation.

Enterprises seeking to thrive in this competitive landscape require robust, scalable infrastructure that adapts to their ever-evolving needs. Recent studies reveal a notable shift, with more than 70% of global leaders adopting consumption-based models like IT as a Service (ITaaS) to address ongoing modernization issues. This evolving trend is projected to gain further momentum. In addition, Storage as a Service (STaaS) is predicted to surpass 35% of enterprise storage capital expenditures, marking a substantial increase from the less than 10% recorded in 2023, per Gartner. Navigating the intricacies of more distributed environments poses a formidable struggle.

Moving to and operating in highly distributed, hybrid cloud environments is a must for data-driven enterprises. It’s no longer a luxury, but a strategic imperative to meet both financial and business goals. Hybrid cloud models are increasingly in demand to match the requirements of modern application architectures, enabling a winning combination of greater agility, security, and cost efficiency.

However, managing hybrid cloud isn’t without its challenges. It requires navigating the intricate terrain of diverse operating models and legacy systems thereby potentially increasing overall complexity. While human touch poses risks such as misconfiguration, long wait times, incomplete tracking, and inconsistent execution, adding to the ever-present security and data protection concerns. Automation can help mitigate these risks by ensuring precise and rapid workflows, reducing human error, enhancing consistency, and allowing for streamlined processes that optimize overall system performance.

The true value of any cloud solution lies in its ease of use, ease of automation, flexible cost models, coupled with unwavering reliability and resilience. That’s why IT decision makers prioritize scalability, security, cost efficiency, and resource management, ensuring their critical operations never miss a beat.

While micro clouds, being smaller and closer to the end-users or data sources, and industry-specific clouds, such as healthcare clouds, finance clouds, etc., will continue to evolve. The hybrid cloud approach involves the data and application ecosystem, including the edge, and storing and processing data in different environments, including on-premises data centers.

The key is constructing a hybrid cloud tailored to your specific requirements, regardless of data location and effectively managing the right apps, data, and services in the appropriate places, at the optimal cost. This optimization aligns with SLAs that define the operating environment or ecosystem rules governing the overall experience beyond just provisioning time.

By offering flexibility, Enterprise Hybrid Cloud solutions, encompassing IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service) and Managed Services Cloud , can emerge as a game-changer. Solution flexibility enables businesses to construct a hybrid cloud aligned with their requirements and optimizing the placement of infrastructure and services for cost-effectiveness and performance. The result is an adaptable solution that navigates diverse needs within the enterprise ecosystem.

“The flexible consumption model for high-performing IaaS, enables us to drive greater savings from a TCO perspective, while managed services add an extra layer of value ensuring reliability.”

–Mizuho Securities Asia

Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud

Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud enables organizations to streamline operations, unlocks new business opportunities, reduce costs, and enhance overall efficiency. This, in turn, can as industry leaders capable of navigating complexities while enhancing operations.

The combined compute, storage and networking, Infrastructure as a Service, platform-focused solutions bring an additional layer of value to hybrid cloud solutions, by offering end-to-end operational management of the integrated solutions. This ensures optimal performance and reliability over time, as proven with Global 100 customers. The service inherently drives committed Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) savings to the customer, as it is built into the model/pricing.

With IT leaders being asked to do more on tighter budgets, cost efficiency remains a top concern. To this end, Hitachi and Cisco have maintained long histories of delivering on Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) reductions to customers. These innovative solutions have the advantages of greater ROI, expanded interoperability and observability with existing systems and reduced deployed power and footprint requirements over other offerings on the market today.

Greater Performance and Cost Control

Every organization’s cloud journey is unique. The right service provider should be able to meet you wherever you are, whether you’re just starting your ascent or well on your way. A comprehensive suite of services, encompassing digital innovation, insightful advisory and assessment, and expert operational management are essential to ensuring you can make the most of your investments.

Agility is crucial in today’s fast-paced business environment, Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud enables organizations to respond rapidly to market changes and customer demands. Optimizing combined infrastructure needs and enhancing overall business by

  • Significantly reducing Total Cost of Ownership (TCO). The partnership extends the portfolio breadth and customer benefits of both organizations. Traditionally reducing Customer TCO by 30-50% through just-in-time delivery, consumption based and go forward pricing, automation, financial engineering, and labor optimization.
  • Enabling companies to only pay for the resources they use, avoid upfront capital expenses, and predict more accurate budgeting through a Cloud-like Support and Consumption Model Offering the ability to scale.
  • Providing an enhanced customer experience. Automation & Observability delivers a streamlined user experience while also providing a comprehensive view across an entire hybrid environment, delivering insights into costs, configurations, and optimal usage across the portfolio.

Hitachi and Cisco deliver IT infrastructure in a “cloud-like” manner without additional risk, challenges, and disappointments that many have found in pursuit of a hybrid cloud strategy. The combined capabilities, encompassing a number of use cases, enable leaders to drive tangible benefits from operational efficiency to improved security while addressing challenges related to legacy systems.

Use Cases

  • Robust Data Center Transformation: Ensure a seamless transition to a modernized infrastructure, accelerate application performance and scalability while maintaining a high level of data availability. Deploy fully managed converged infrastructure solutions trusted globally for managing critical applications and data.
  • Hybrid Cloud Acceleration: Enhance your hybrid cloud capabilities, scale on demand, and meet sustainability goals. Leverage our turnkey converged infrastructure solutions integrating storage, compute, and networking essential to successful hybrid cloud adoption.
  • Trusted Platform for Critical Workloads: Manage and safeguard critical workloads. This optimal tuned solution for storage, compute and network, emerges as a trusted platform and is recognized globally for its reliability.

To learn more please visit Hitachi EverFlex with Cisco Powered Hybrid Cloud or Contact Us today for an ROI assessment to see how much you could save.


Jeb Horton

Jeb Horton

As SVP, Global Services, Jeb is responsible for leading the Americas professional and managed services business to help customers manage and leverage their data to improve customer experiences and create new opportunities to drive innovation and growth.