Japanese Company Hitachi Launches its Own Sovereign Cloud

Hitachi has launched a VMware-powered sovereign cloud service in Japan to join a growing list of over 4000 companies that have received the VMware sovereign cloud designation.

This will not be the company’s first cloud venture as it already offers another VMware-powered managed cloud service known as Enterprise Cloud Service G2. It also offers storage as a service. However, signing up to be part of sovereign cloud providers is a major step toward the company becoming a recognised cloud provider.

As more businesses adopt cloud technology, it has become critical to protect data privacy and ensure that consumer data cannot be accessed by governments beyond local borders.

This has led to the growth of a market for smaller clouds which although don’t offer the same scalability as the hyper clouds, can guarantee data protection.

This is the gap that Hitachi is looking to fill. With their new partnership with VMware, customer data will be stored in data centres in Japan, managed and operated by Hitachi. Other companies that have partnered with VMware to offer sovereign clouds include UKCloud, OVHcloud, Noovle, NxtGen, ThinkOn, AUCloud, Datacom, TietoEvry, Telefonica, and Telmex.

Businesses are choosing these companies over big names like AWS, Alibaba, Google, and Oracle which offer hyper clouds but have US and Chinese origins making them subject to laws that may allow their governments access to customer data.

In their product description, Hitachi notes that customers will have access to a self-service portal where they can do tasks such as increasing the number of hosts or CPU they employ.

At the moment, the services are only available in Japan and there are no plans by the company to do a global launch.

However, Hitachi has partnered with AUcloud through their subsidiary Hitachi Vantara to offer sovereign cloud services in Australia. The partnership allows Hitachi Vantara to use AUCloud’s infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services to set up their cloud services.