The FINANCIAL — IBM announced the opening of its first cloud data center with SoftLayer in Japan, located in Tokyo. This announcement comes on the heels of recent SoftLayer cloud data center launches in Melbourne and Paris and represents the next step in IBM’s $1.2 billion investment to expand its global cloud footprint, according to IBM.
The facility in Tokyo complements other SoftLayer resources located in cities within the Asia-Pacific region, including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Melbourne and broadens data redundancy options and geographic diversity within IBM’s growing number of cloud data centers worldwide.
It also addresses the industry’s growing concerns about data residency and privacy by offering a local Japanese facility to compute and store sensitive data that needs to remain in country.
“Since we established a Singapore cloud data center in September 2011, SoftLayer has seen tremendous growth in the Asia-Pacific market,” said Lance Crosby, CEO of SoftLayer, an IBM Company. “Our new cloud data center in Tokyo will support this evolving market by offering locally the security, resiliency, and efficiency that customers are demanding around the world,” Crosby added.
The Tokyo cloud data center is launching at an opportune time for IBM Cloud. Between Q3 2013 and Q3 2014, IBM Cloud’s customer base in Japan increased more than 600 percent, and Japanese customers using its SoftLayer Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) now total more than 1,000, according to IBM.
“IBM Cloud’s global expansion of SoftLayer cloud data centers, including the new facility in Tokyo, is good for our business,” said Hiroyuki Mashita, managing director and vice president of PioneerVC Corporation. “We are based in Japan and have clients located all over the world who use our real-time collaboration solution xSync Prime, which relies on SoftLayer’s robust bare metal and virtual cloud servers, services, and worldwide network to provide a low-latency connection. We plan to move some of our clients’ accounts and domestic data into the new cloud data center as soon as it opens in Tokyo,” Mashita added.
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