Organisations across Japan have been moving their mission-critical workloads to the Cloud.
The Japanese government’s adoption “cloud-by-default” principle and basic policy prioritising the use of cloud services, coincides with the launch of a second full region in Japan by AWS.
The AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region will expand the existing AWS Osaka Local Region, which opened to select customers in February 2018. The new region consists of three Availability Zones (AZs) and joins the existing 25 Availability Zones in eight AWS Regions across Asia Pacific in Beijing, Hong Kong, Mumbai, Ningxia, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, and Tokyo.
Takuya Hirai, Member of the House of Representatives and Minister of State for Digital Transformation said the mission of the Japan Digital Transformation Agency, scheduled to be established in September 2021, is to think about how systems should be run on the cloud in order to promote standardisation and interoperability, which are necessary for both national and local governments to promote digitalisation.
“In cooperation with various companies, including AWS, we will do our utmost to promote the digitalisation of Japan,” he said.
AWS Regions are comprised of Availability Zones, which place infrastructure in separate and distinct geographic locations with enough distance to significantly reduce the risk of a single event impacting customers’ business continuity, yet near enough to provide low latency for high availability applications.
Each Availability Zone has independent power, cooling, and physical security and is connected via redundant, ultra-low-latency networks. AWS customers focused on high availability can design their applications to run in multiple Availability Zones and across multiple regions to achieve even greater fault tolerance. Additionally, Japanese customers, from startups to enterprises and the public sector, will have additional infrastructure to leverage advanced technologies including compute, storage, analytics, database, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT), mobile services, and more to drive innovation. The launch of a second AWS Region in Japan provides customers with even lower latency across the country and supports disaster recovery applications for business continuity.
Organisations across Japan have been moving their mission-critical workloads to the Cloud.
This includes Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), whose business operations include commercial banks, trust banks, securities, and credit cards, adopted a cloud-first strategy and announced its full AWS deployment in 2017.
“We have been making steady progress in IT architecture transformation and digitalisation by leveraging AWS to build new systems,” said Hiroki Kameda managing corporate executive and group CIO of MUFG. “AWS enabled us to build a big data platform for all our bank and group data so that we can use it flexibly, streamline administrative processes such as tremendous data entry work using AI, migrate a part of a market risk management system, and conduct applied research in more advanced AI algorithms and other new technologies.
Globally, AWS has 80 Availability Zones across 25 geographic regions, with plans to launch 15 more Availability Zones and five more AWS Regions in Australia, India, Indonesia, Spain, and Switzerland. Starting today, developers, startups, and enterprises, as well as government, education, and non-profit organizations can leverage the new AWS Asia Pacific (Osaka) Region to run their applications locally, serve end-users across.
