Hitachi Employee Receives the TAGGIE Award from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation for International Leadership in Technical Advisory Activities

April 15, 2026
Hitachi, Ltd.

Yoshiyuki Tabata, Chief OSS Consultant at Hitachi, Ltd. (Hitachi) OSPO (Open Source Program Office), has received the TAGGIE Award^*1 at the CNCF Community Awards^*2, organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation^*3 (CNCF), which leads the development and adoption of cloud native technologies. This award recognizes his outstanding contributions as a technical leader, including his role in leading global initiatives on international security standardization in the AI and cloud native domains, as well as his ongoing contribution to the development of the CNCF community.

Since 2025, Tabata has served as Tech Lead^*4 of TAG Security and Compliance^*5, a technical advisory group on security and compliance within the CNCF. Leveraging his deep expertise, he has played a leading role in advancing security standardization initiatives. Specifically, he has been instrumental in developing a white paper on Identity and Access Management^*6 (IAM), a framework for securely managing access to applications and data; fostering security communities across the APAC region; and promoting use cases that apply authentication and authorization technologies—centered on Keycloak^*7—to the secure utilization of AI. These contributions were highly recognized and led to this award.

The authentication and authorization technologies recognized by this award are essential to ensuring the reliability of agentic AI—AI systems that autonomously make decisions and take actions—and to accelerating their real-world adoption. To further promote the dissemination and standardization of these critical technologies, Hitachi became the first Japanese company to join the Agentic AI Foundation^*8 (AAIF), an organization dedicated to advancing the standardization of agentic AI, in March 2026.

Through its activities within AAIF and other initiatives, Hitachi will further advance state-of-the-art security technologies on a global scale and expand secure AI use cases in collaboration with partners worldwide. In addition, by applying these outcomes to HMAX by Hitachi*⁹ (HMAX), a suite of next-generation solutions that brings the power of AI to social infrastructure through AI, Hitachi will contribute to the realization of a safe and secure social infrastructure.

In March 2026, Tabata delivered a presentation on security in cloud native environments amid the growing adoption of AI at "KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2026,"^*10 the world’s largest global event bringing together cloud native engineers and enterprise users, held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. In his presentation, he outlined  standardized and practical approaches to authentication and authorization that enable AI and workloads to securely access data and services across multiple domains within cloud native environments. Through such global outreach activities, he is dedicated to advancing the development of AI and cloud native technologies.