Uncertainty in today’s global economy

                                                   Uncertainty in today’s global economy

In the wake of Japan’s cascading disasters, indicators of Information Technology changes might dramatically occur.

September 11, 2001 was one of the darkest days to the USA, as well as the global economy. I was in New Jersey then, serving my IT duties at a telecommunication company over there. We all were extreme scared. After 9-11, quite a few IT openings were closed. Some people believe this is a negative impact coming from economic loss. However, as a result of that incident, a few financial institutions were quickly building new data centers in southern states. By doing so, if a similar situation occurs, at least, their business function could continue. This type geographic re-location program, of course, eliminated some job openings, brings more people applying for unemployment benefit.

Japan’s last month earthquake broke our heart. Although Japanese are well educated to manage and survive once this type disaster happens. Nevertheless, we were still seeing a lot of manufacturing facilities could not resume normal functions as they would like to be. Building a disaster recovery facility, both in manufacturing and IT function probably would be required to do so. And I believe this type of needs shall apply to most of the Asia countries, instead of some of them. As a result, to provide the leasing or renting a cloud computing “data center/facility” might quickly be an emerging business opportunity for those hardware provider(s). This should increase the speed of hardware providers to release their products in the market sooner, not later though.