Japanese multinational conglomerate Hitachi has launched a VMware-powered cloud service in Japan, which it styles as a “sovereign cloud”. The Register first published this announcement in English, after Hitachi released the news on an article in Japanese.
VMware introduced the term “sovereign cloud” to distinguish its services for over 4000 of its partners which operate small clouds, and attests to their operations being subject to privacy laws and governance structures in the countries within which VMware operates.
Currently, several major public cloud corporations such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and Alibaba offer VMware-powered clouds at hyperscale.
However, some companies may still be concerned about their vulnerability to data sovereignty laws which may place the data they store under the extraterritorial oversight of governments. For instance, the Act on the Protection of Personal Information (APPI), Japan’s data protection and privacy law, was first adopted in 2003, has been amended to apply to all business operators who handle the personal information of individuals in Japan, including businesses located within, and those located outside, Japan. Hence, Japan’s data privacy law also has an extraterritorial dimension.
VMware offers sovereign clouds to customers as a means of enabling its clients to extend into hybrid clouds or pure-play clouds at a small-scale level, while protecting them from legal complications.
On June 23 2022, Hitachi announced that it has created a VMware-powered sovereign cloud.
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Although Hitachi already offers a VMware-powered managed cloud which spans on-perm and public cloud, as well as storage-as-a-service, The Register observed that Hitachi’s signing up as a VMware-powered sovereign cloud takes it a step closer towards becoming a cloud provider, albeit on a significantly smaller scale than large players in the cloud industry.
Earlier, Hitachi Vantara, a subsidiary of Hitachi, teamed up with AUCloud to use its infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) services as the basis of a sovereign cloud in Australia.
This agreement between Hitachi Vantara and AUCloud enables AUCloud to deliver its IaaS service to Hitachi Vantara, in support of government and corporate customers looking for secure and sovereign cloud platforms.
With Hitachi’s latest offering of sovereign cloud in Japan, Hitachi now provides customers with a portal for self-service chores, such as increasing the number of hosts and CPUs they employ.
The Register noted that the offering of sovereign cloud in Japan may be the first of other similar offerings Hitachi intends to roll out.
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