Cloud & Infrastructure

The Infrastructure Problem in Japan

Your global HQ wants everything in the cloud. Your Japan office runs a mission-critical application on aging hardware in a Tokyo data center with an NTT circuit that took three months to provision. The finance team in New York keeps asking why Japan's IT costs are so high, while the local team can't explain in English why the on-premises setup exists in the first place. Sound familiar?

Infrastructure decisions in Japan sit at the intersection of carrier relationships, vendor procurement timelines, data residency expectations, and the constant need to translate technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders overseas. eSolia handles all of that — the carrier negotiations, the cloud architecture, the vendor coordination, and the explaining-it-to-HQ part.

Cloud Solutions and Migration

On-Premises vs. Cloud Infrastructure

Cloud Platform Expertise

All three major cloud platforms maintain both Tokyo and Osaka regions, giving Japan-based companies genuine options for data residency and disaster recovery within the country. The right choice depends less on feature checklists and more on what your organization already runs.

If your company is deeply invested in Microsoft 365 and Active Directory, Azure is the natural starting point — its hybrid capabilities through Azure Arc mean you can extend identity management to on-premises systems you're not ready to retire. AWS remains the broadest platform with the largest third-party ecosystem, making it a strong default for organizations without existing commitments. GCP tends to win when workloads lean toward data analytics, machine learning, or heavy Kubernetes usage, and its tight Google Workspace integration appeals to companies already in that ecosystem.

We often see clients running two platforms: one for production workloads and another inherited through an acquisition or a SaaS dependency. That's normal. The goal isn't to force everything onto one provider — it's to make deliberate choices about what runs where and why.

Platform Comparison

Cloud Migration Services

A cloud migration is really a series of decisions: what moves first, what gets re-architected versus lifted as-is, what stays on-premises for now, and how to keep the business running during each transition. We start by inventorying your current infrastructure — not just the servers and storage, but the dependencies between systems, the network paths, and the contracts with local vendors that might have notice periods or early-termination fees.

From there, we develop a phased approach. Some workloads can be lifted and shifted to the cloud immediately. Others need re-platforming — swapping out a self-managed database for a managed service, for example. A few might justify a full re-architecture if the cloud-native version would be dramatically cheaper to run or easier to maintain. We map out the sequence so that each phase delivers value on its own, rather than requiring everything to move before anything improves.

After the migration itself, we right-size resources based on actual usage patterns (not the over-provisioned estimates from the planning phase), set up cost alerts, and hand over documented runbooks to your team or your ongoing managed services provider.

Migration Process

On-Premises Infrastructure

Data Center Services

Not everything belongs in the cloud — at least not yet. Some organizations keep workloads on-premises because of latency requirements, regulatory constraints, or simply because a system is stable, paid off, and not worth the disruption of moving. We support those environments too.

Our data center work covers design through daily operations: compute, storage, and network architecture using VMware, Hyper-V, or KVM for virtualization, with SAN, NAS, or object storage depending on the workload. We handle capacity planning so you're not caught off-guard by growth, coordinate patching schedules to minimize disruption, and manage the vendor relationships that on-premises infrastructure always seems to accumulate — hardware maintenance contracts, cabling vendors, data center facility providers.

When it's time to relocate — whether to a new facility or out of a data center entirely — we run the full planning process: equipment audit, dependency mapping, migration scheduling with rollback plans, and post-move validation. The goal is zero unplanned downtime, which requires more planning than most people expect.

Hybrid and Multi-Cloud Architecture

Most companies we work with in Japan end up with some version of a hybrid environment, whether by design or by accident. A line-of-business application that can't move to the cloud yet, a local file server that employees rely on, a vendor system that only runs on-premises — these are normal. The question is whether to manage the hybrid reality deliberately or let it grow into a tangle of inconsistent configurations.

Hybrid Cloud Architecture

A well-designed hybrid setup uses unified management and monitoring across both environments, synchronizes identity and access control, and makes deliberate decisions about where data lives and how it replicates. For multi-cloud scenarios — running production on AWS while using Azure for Microsoft 365 and identity, say — we focus on keeping architectures portable where it counts, centralizing identity management, and consolidating billing visibility so you can actually see what you're spending across providers.

Networking and Connectivity

Enterprise Networking and Telecom

Networking in Japan has a particular quality that catches foreign companies off-guard: lead times. Ordering a new circuit from NTT can take weeks to months depending on the type. KDDI and SoftBank have their own timelines. If you're opening an office, expanding capacity, or connecting a new site, the network procurement needs to start well before everything else.

We handle the carrier relationships end-to-end — negotiating contracts in Japanese, managing provisioning timelines, coordinating installation dates with building management, and translating the status updates into something your regional IT team can actually track. For multi-site operations, we design LAN/WAN architectures with proper segmentation and redundancy, and implement SD-WAN where the traffic patterns justify it. SD-WAN is particularly useful in Japan for companies with multiple offices that want application-aware routing and direct cloud breakout without backhauling everything through a single site.

On the security side, we deploy next-generation firewalls, VPN configurations for remote access, network access control, and DDoS protection. For companies that need direct cloud connectivity — AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or GCP Partner Interconnect — we handle the setup and the carrier-side coordination that these connections require in Japan.

Virtualization and Containers

Virtualization and Container Platforms

Virtualization is still the backbone of most enterprise environments in Japan. VMware (vSphere, vCenter, NSX, vSAN) remains the dominant platform, and we've run hundreds of VMware deployments — migrations, consolidations, version upgrades, disaster recovery configurations using Site Recovery Manager. For organizations looking to reduce VMware licensing costs, we also implement Hyper-V and KVM-based alternatives.

Containers are a different story. Kubernetes has matured to the point where it makes sense for many production workloads, but it's not a default choice — it adds operational complexity that smaller teams may not be ready for. When it is the right fit, we help with cluster design, application containerization, CI/CD integration, and the monitoring and logging setup that makes a Kubernetes environment actually manageable. The managed services — Amazon EKS, Azure AKS, Google GKE — reduce the operational burden significantly, and we help clients pick the right one based on what they're already running.

Infrastructure Monitoring and Management

Monitoring, Automation, and Infrastructure as Code

You can't manage what you can't see, and this is where many Japan offices fall behind — running infrastructure without proper monitoring until something breaks at 2 AM. We set up monitoring that covers infrastructure metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network), application performance, and log aggregation in a way that generates useful alerts rather than noise. Good monitoring also feeds capacity planning: with trend data, you can forecast growth, catch bottlenecks early, and make budget requests backed by actual numbers.

For organizations ready to treat infrastructure as code, we implement automation using Terraform, CloudFormation, or ARM templates for provisioning, and Ansible for configuration management. Version-controlled infrastructure definitions mean changes are tracked, peer-reviewed, and reproducible — no more undocumented manual changes that create snowflake environments. This is especially valuable for companies with infrastructure across Tokyo and Osaka regions or in multiple cloud accounts, where consistency counts and manual management doesn't scale.

Why eSolia

We've managed infrastructure in Japan for More than 26 years — carrier negotiations with NTT and KDDI, data center relocations with zero unplanned downtime, and cloud migrations across AWS, Azure, and GCP. We don't take vendor commissions, so our recommendations reflect what actually fits your situation. Our bilingual team keeps both your local staff and global headquarters aligned throughout.

Get Started

Contact us to talk through your infrastructure situation — we'll assess what you have and recommend what makes sense.