Japan earthquake's full impact on ICT yet to be determined: IDC

It may be weeks before the full impact of the Japanese quake and resulting tsunamis is on the flow if ICT between the disaster-affected country and Australia is known, IDC has warned.

Read more on the Japan earthquakes.

According to the analyst firm’s senior infrastructure analyst, Trevor Clarke, the supply of completed products, parts and components from Japan will likely be affected.

“There are some Japanese vendors which may have interruptions to their supply chains, especially Sony and potentially Toshiba, which have factories in the disaster-affected region,” Clarke said.

“Japan is a big supplier of memory — NAND and DRAM are the big ones — so the disaster could have an impact [on supply].

“That said, most of these Japanese organisations are prepared for emergency situations and they have systems, policies and people in place to get back on track pretty quickly.”

Clarke said that while there were a number of major global data centres in the Yokohama and Tokyo regions, Japanese building codes factoring in the possibility of earthquakes would likely mean any interruptions to service were relatively short lived.

“A lot of Japanese companies have survived earthquakes over the years and I suspect a lot of the data centres are operating well and getting back to normal,” he said.

“The challenge will be energy supply [due to] rolling blackouts, but they will have generators in place and there will be energy prioritisation to critical systems as they can’t afford for the economy to fall down.

"So you will see larger companies continue to have a flow of electricity to their data centres and operations.”

Early reports have indicated that undersea telecommunications cables in and out of Japan appeared to have mostly survived the devastating earthquake.

In related news, Australian ambassador, Murray McLean, has said hundreds of emails from Australians caught up in Japan's earthquake have been sent to the embassy there.

As of Monday morning, Australia's embassy in Japan had received about 500 emails from "people who are sending in their particulars or asking particular questions".

Follow Tim Lohman on Twitter: @TLohman

Follow Computerworld Australia on Twitter: @ComputerworldAU

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