The Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami destroyed nearly every piece of social infrastructure and lifeline in the Tohoku region on March 11, 2011. Power, water and gas supplies were all interrupted in Miyagi, Iwate and Fukushima prefectures, while communication lines in and out of the prefectures were cut.

Computers were of course no exception. The strength of the magnitude-9.0 earthquake, the largest in recorded Japanese history, knocked out many computers and servers and any that survived the quake were subsequently destroyed by the massive tsunami.

It was only days after the disaster that governments in the disaster-hit areas turned their attention to cloud computing outsourcing services as tools to meet the pressing demands of resuming municipal services as soon as possible. In the five years since the disaster, cloud computing services evolved to meet a wider variety of administrative demands, and have now entered into a new phase, industry officials said.