Cloud Computing in Japan: Still Online?
TalkinCloud remains sensitive to the ongoing human tragedy in Japan. But we’re also watching closely to see how the recent earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power plant issues may impact cloud computing initiatives within Japan and across the Asia Pacific region.
Contributing Associate Blogger Matt Weinberger is reaching out to a range of cloud providers and service providers that do business in Japan. Weinberger plans to follow up with a deeper report but a quick scan of the cloud news seems relatively promising.
Amazon, for one, says its recently opened data center in Tokyo continues to function. A quick check of the Amazon Web Services health dashboard, as of 2:57 p.m. eastern on March 14, shows various Amazon services (CloudWatch, Elastic Compute Cloud, Relational Database Service, Simple Notification Service, Simple Storage Service, SimpleDB and CloudFormation) all running normally.
Still, Japanese officials are urging the public to limit their electricity consumption in a bid to avoid lengthy rolling blackouts. Tokyo Electric Power Co., the country’s leading utility, has already implemented some planned blackouts. Also, technology firms Sony, Panasonic, Toshiba and Canon are trying to conduct facility safety checks but continuing aftershocks have hindered those efforts, according to BBC.
Longer term, we’re also checking to see if the 2nd Annual Cloud Computing Expo Japan (May 11-13, Tokyo) will proceed as planned.
The TalkinCloud team will be back soon with a more detailed report.
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