Hitachi Vantara has Raised the Bar For Object Storage

Hitachi has been a leader in OT for industries such as finance, government, manufacturing, power/energy and transportation for over 100 years, providing solutions that have positively impacted businesses at large. With extensive resources in people, capital, patents, and partners, we are already providing IoT solutions for cities, industries and businesses. Our capabilities – and our social innovation mission – are built on Hitachi’s 100+ years in operational technology (OT) and 50+ years in IT. To address this market, we work towards harnessing business, human and machine data across OT and IT environments to build comprehensive and data-driven solutions to provide customers the provisions of being able to manage, store, govern, blend, analyse, and visualize data.

In an interaction of PC Quest with Sanjay Agrawal, Director – Platforms and Solutions Group, Hitachi Vantara, India, gives the overview and roadmap ahead for the company.

How is Hitachi Vantara helping customers become “Data and Insight Rich” through your expertise in IT and OT?

Sanjay Agrawal, Director – Platforms and Solutions Group, Hitachi Vantara, India

At Hitachi, we believe that data is an important asset if one knows how to use it. The key to new revenue streams, better customer experiences, and lower business costs lies in your data, waiting to be discovered. It reveals the path to innovation and new ways for the society and the world to work.

With the launch of our new business entity, Hitachi Vantara aims at leveraging the broad portfolio of innovation, development, and experience from across Hitachi Group companies to deliver data-driven solutions for commercial and industrial enterprises. Hitachi Vantara helps customers become data and insight rich giving them an innovation advantage by merging operational and informational experience. We are data management, analytics, industrial expertise, technology and outcomes rolled into one great solution provider.
By unifying the operations of Hitachi Data Systems, Hitachi Insight Group, and Pentaho into a single integrated business, Hitachi Vantara aims to bring new data-driven solutions and services to market in order to help our customers achieve tangible outcomes that positively drive business and society forward.

Can you explain the new challenges you are facing in the space of Cloud and Data Analytics services?

Today, big data and cloud technologies are the top two initiatives that have taken priority for organisations to create a competitive advantage in the market. Big data is fundamentally changing the way businesses compete and operate. In the interim, not only do cloud delivery models offer exceptional flexibility but deploying cloud infrastructure to analyse big data takes advantage of valuable external data sources and applications provided in public clouds. Although this space is seeing rapid development and opening up different doors of opportunities, the challenges today are primarily around security and data quality.

Cloud technology is seeing maturity and addressing barriers to adoption by enhancing business agility, however, the journey to the public cloud is one of the things about India specifically where data sovereignty issues need to be considered. The loss of private information on a massive scale can be any firm’s nightmare. The industry scenario today speaks volumes about just how any and every business owner must prioritise employing the right kind of cyber-security strategy for its business to reduce risk and enhance data protection. This means protecting data right from devices to storage, network, data center, and the cloud is crucial.

The issue of data quality has also grown in significance as we strive to make decisions on strategies, markets, and marketing in near real time. With the growing volumes of data and with focus on unstructured data surfacing in large amounts at a fast pace, data analytics solutions can only be as good as the data that is going into it.

With security being a primary concern for organisations today, how are you staying protected from future attacks?

Security and protection of sensitive data is a major concern of data management today. At a time when the industry is seeing a rising concern in putting security first, organisations have realised the significance of rethinking their approach to security analytics. However, with the rapid adoption of mobile, cloud, big data and IOT, cybersecurity tools need to detect potential cyber-attacks faster. To do this, teams need to blend a large volume and variety of data from applications, networks, and servers. According to recent research, the average analyst takes about 205 days to detect an attack due to the huge volume and variety of data to go through. This not only includes big data but also consists of unstructured data from all kinds of sources including log files, web access data, etc. that are difficult to blend. At Hitachi Vantara, Pentaho, our big data analytics solution provides real-time threat intelligence, risk-based alerting, and identify abnormal user behaviour, while addressing the need to ensure appropriate access to resources across increasingly heterogeneous technology environments and meet increasingly rigorous compliance requirements.

At Hitachi Vantara, our security services address business objectives to manage risk and meet compliance by providing:

• Information security consulting services that encompass governance, risk and compliance functions.
• A team of security experts with industry certifications and real-life experience as security practitioners
• A channelized approach that relates business objectives to the protection of information and information systems.

How are you preparing for upcoming challenges of the digital world, and can you please elaborate on security in the Mobile Cloud Era on BYOD?

With the speed in which we are moving towards complete digitisation, both in the workplace and personally –an organization's ability to get full value from all data available is important. Our mission is to help organizations across industries harness the value from all their data, including big data and Internet of Things (IoT), enabling them to find new revenue streams, operate more efficiently, deliver outstanding service and minimize risk.

Hitachi Vantara has a wide range of products and solutions, which support cloud, big data analytics, converged infrastructure, storage, servers and data protection, which ensures operational excellence. We power the digital enterprise by integrating the best information technology and operational technology across Hitachi family of companies.

With regards to BYOD, Hitachi Vantara was intent on supporting bring-your-own-device (BYOD) mobility to promote greater collaboration and productivity Instead of attempting to manage myriad consumer cloud-based file sharing services, we chose to develop our own file sync and share the solution, HCP Anywhere. While BYOD can improve how work is accomplished, the concerns for IT leaders today are around how one should manage company files, protect intellectual property and mitigate related costs. HCP Anywhere grants immediate access to files without constraints of file size or mailbox limits and modernizes how data is shared. End users download the HCP Anywhere app, which automatically syncs to all registered devices and becomes available via Web browsers. In addition, Hitachi uses a proven and integrated approach to manage distributed IT environments and the flood of storage requirements for unstructured content. We help cloud service providers and enterprise customers more easily provide storage services to geographically dispersed users.  These solutions help to seamlessly and securely move data between distributed locations and a centralized infrastructure.

Can you elaborate on how Hitachi Object Storage Solutions help transform an organisation’s data mobility?

Hitachi Vantara takes the general concept of object storage a leap forward with the Hitachi data mobility solution. We provide intelligent, object-based storage solutions and applications that support diverse use cases like file synchronisation and sharing, cloud storage, big data, compliance and archiving, from a single cluster simultaneously. These object storage solutions enable efficient operations, security, protect valuable assets, and help IT stay agile as organisations and business needs evolve which allows the value of unstructured data to be harnessed. We are committed to expanding the depth and breadth of our data mobility solution portfolio by embracing and extending support for commodity hardware, open source technologies, and public cloud. The HCP solution gets to the heart of what many customers are looking to accomplish in the areas of hybrid cloud and workforce mobility while retaining visibility and control over their digital asset.

How is Hitachi’s Content Portfolio (HCP) greatly reducing customer costs and managing risks in today’s industry?

We recently announced major updates to the Hitachi Content Platform (HCP) portfolio, providing a path to digital transformation for enterprises while achieving significant cost savings over public cloud. The integrated portfolio offers the capability to increase profitability and productivity through cloud economics and by applying analytics to uncover new opportunities and insights.

With our uniquely integrated Hitachi Content Platform portfolio, Hitachi Vantara has raised the bar for object storage with our unique end-to-end solution that eliminates silos, enables governance and automates management in private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments. This also allows for reducing overall risk by enhancing security and providing built-in encryption. To address security-conscious customer needs, HCP has added a dedicated management port that isolates user and administrator network traffic for an added level of security.