How Guarantees and SLAs Take the Risk Out of Enterprise IT Infrastructure

Derek Beckford
Director of Offering Management, IaaS

June 26, 2025

How Guarantees and SLAs Take the Risk Out of Enterprise IT Infrastructure

For many IT leaders, the shift from self-run on-premises infrastructure to consumption-based infrastructure as a service (IaaS) represents a strategic opportunity. The promise of scalability, cost-efficiency and agility while maintaining greater control and security is undeniable. But so are concerns about reliability, control and governance. That’s where guarantees and service level agreements (SLAs) come in.

SLAs are more than just legal commitments – they’re trust-building tools defining expectations between consumption service providers and their customers. Crafted correctly, they offer measurable performance benchmarks, assurances and recourse in the event of service disruptions. This helps IT teams mitigate risk, maintain business continuity and confidently implement IT transformation and data modernization in their organizations.

The emergence of SLAs and guarantees doesn’t just make infrastructure more reliable. It makes it smarter. So, whether you're managing your first cloud optimization project or evolving your existing strategy, understanding the power of SLAs can have a dramatic impact on your business outcomes.

Things to Know About Crafting SLAs

Before purchasing infrastructure as a service from any provider offering compute, storage and data center network services on demand, it is important to thoroughly evaluate and understand operational expectations of your customers. This includes the existing performance of your company owned and operated on-prem systems, what happens in the event of downtime, and systems in place to hold the provider accountable.

This is where SLAs and guarantees become essential, providing a formal commitment outlining the expected level of service, including uptime (e.g., availability), performance (e.g., latency), support response times, and compensation/remediation in the event of failure.

All of which takes an SLA from being a legal safeguard and turns it into a strategic enabler. Providing transparency, setting expectations and creating a framework for accountability. Meaning IT leaders have fewer surprises and more control in service-driven environments.

Reducing Risk Through SLA Guarantees with Hitachi Vantara

One of the biggest barriers to cloud adoption is perceived risk. SLAs help to mitigate this ensuring business continuity, clarifying expectations and responsibilities, and providing financial protection.

Hitachi Vantara knows a thing or two about SLAs, with a lengthy history of customer guarantees that have long set us apart in the market. This includes our industry leading 100% Data Availability Guarantee, trusted by IT innovators for over two decades, Modern Storage Assurance, for future-proof storage investments, and our 4:1 No Questions Asked Effective Capacity Guarantee.

More recently, we turned up the volume on our guarantees across our recently launched Virtual Storage Platform One (VSP One) data platform, which unifies data infrastructure across block, file and object workloads. We did this with the addition of three entirely new customer guarantees designed to further reduce cyber and regulatory risk, improve performance and efficiency, and reduce environmental impact.

Enter Hitachi EverFlex IaaS: SLA-Driven Infrastructure as a Service

While these new VSP One guarantees represented a major advance in delivering resilient data infrastructure, ready for the AI era, we also recognize that as IT consumption models evolve, organizations also want guarantees to reinforce our commitment to flexible, SLA-based services.

Hitachi EverFlex Infrastructure as a Service is an industry leading IaaS offering that extends the robust capabilities of the VSP One Data platform with enterprise-grade service level agreements (SLAs) that typically deliver TCO reductions of 30% more than traditional alternative services.

EverFlex takes the foundational strength of VSP One and elevates it into a fully managed, SLA-backed IaaS offering. It allows organizations to consume storage, compute and data services with predictable pay-per-use models while maintaining full enterprise control over performance, security and compliance.

Hitachi EverFlex also translates – and expands on – traditional VSP One Guarantees into SLA-backed commitments, covering key dimensions of service delivery:

SLA-Backed Availability with 100% Uptime Commitment
While VSP One already offers a 100% Data Availability Guarantee, EverFlex transforms it into a contractually enforced SLA. Customers can now hold Hitachi accountable not just for infrastructure performance, but also for ensuring continuous service availability under a pay-per-use model. This is particularly valuable for industries with zero tolerance for downtime, such as financial services, healthcare and manufacturing.
Elastic Scalability with Consumption SLAs
EverFlex supports elastic scaling of capacity with metered usage models. Customers can scale up or down within a pre-defined range based on real-time needs, while SLAs govern provisioning timeframes, resource availability and burst capacity support. This operational flexibility enables IT teams to avoid over-provisioning and align usage directly with demand. EverFlex also offers buffer capacity to accommodate unexpected spikes, governed by SLAs that assure timely access without the need for emergency procurement.
Performance SLAs Aligned with Workload Demands
Where traditional infrastructure buyers had to benchmark and validate storage performance manually, EverFlex includes performance SLAs tailored to workload tiers, covering metrics like latency, IOPS and throughput. And because EverFlex is underpinned by AI-driven infrastructure monitoring and analytics, we can be proactive by using Hitachi VSP 360 unified data management with the Hitachi EverFlex Control extension to VSP 360 and optimize configurations using on-site and remotely located IT engineers to fine-tune system performance to meet SLA thresholds.
Sustainability SLA Guarantee
Optimize power utilization for Hitachi EverFlex Storage as a Service (STaaS) with both EverFlex managed and consumption-based services. Consumption is measured using onboard VSP One data monitoring, providing assurance you can plan for and count on a maximum power budget. A service credit is provided in the event the system exceeds the guaranteed power budget.
Efficiency and Data Reduction SLAs
Data reduction technologies are often subject to “it depends” caveats. EverFlex eliminates uncertainty with SLAs that add to VSP One’s built-in compression and deduplication. Customers can opt for efficiency SLAs – typically 4:1 or better – backed by service credits if targets aren’t met. This translates to predictable storage economics and improved capacity planning, especially in data-heavy environments like backup and archiving, virtualization and containerized storage.
Adding SLAs to Our Cyber Resilience Guarantee
With growing regulatory pressures and cyber threats, EverFlex integrates security and compliance SLAs ensuring data encryption, immutability and audit logging are enforced across the lifecycle. Built-in support for compliance frameworks like GDPR, HIPAA and ISO 27001 makes EverFlex a trusted choice for regulated industries. In addition, we offer optional ransomware protection guarantees via immutable snapshots and recovery SLAs.
Managed Services SLAs for Operational Simplicity
Optional ITIL services covering system monitoring, patching, lifecycle management and capacity forecasting. All governed by SLAs around incident response, mean time to resolution (MTTR), and proactive support. Enabling IT teams to offload day-to-day infrastructure management and focus on strategic initiatives.

A Smarter, Safer Path to Storge Infrastructure Solutions

The acquisition and support of enterprise IT infrastructure does not need to be a leap of faith. With well-structured guarantees and SLAs, it becomes a calculated, strategic decision. One that can empower IT leaders to innovate with confidence, reduce operational risk, and focus on what matters most: driving business value.

Hitachi EverFlex represents a significant milestone on this journey and in the evolution in how enterprises procure and manage infrastructure. By combining the technical depth of VSP One with the business assurances of SLAs, EverFlex turns traditional hardware guarantees into measurable, enforceable and outcome-oriented commitments.

With this broad range of SLA Guarantees, Hitachi EverFlex isn’t just extending VSP One. It’s also redefining what enterprise storage means in the era of everything as a service. By aligning technology guarantees with business SLAs, Hitachi EverFlex helps enterprises reduce risk, optimize costs and accelerate digital transformation.

Connect with your Hitachi Vantara representative to get your EverFlex journey started.

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