Weather disasters from climate change are pushing some companies to Amazon's cloud, says CTO

http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/18/amazon-cto-werner-vogels-climate-change-driving-cloud-shift.html

Ari Levy
April 18, 2017

Amazon Web Services has been winning business worldwide from companies that are stripping down their data centers and taking advantage of emerging cloud technologies.

Some clients are signing on for a different reason: climate change.

From New Jersey to Japan, massive storms and earthquakes in recent years have instantly wiped out technical infrastructures, leaving businesses unable to retrieve critical data. Amazon Chief Technology Officer Werner Vogels told CNBC on Tuesday that companies are turning to the cloud to make sure their data is backed up and always accessible.

Speaking in an interview from the AWS Summit in San Francisco, Vogels said that banks and telecommunications companies in the Philippines have been swarming into AWS facilities in Singapore of late, "given the massive typhoons that have hit the country time after time."

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AWS wasn't created to address natural disasters, but there's no denying the trend is pushing companies into its doors. Last year was the warmest on record and NASA predicts that the number of powerful storms will increase as warming continues.

After Hurricane Sandy in 2012 on the New Jersey coast, an AWS client that builds backup solutions saw a surge in demand from nearby customers "that became interested in backing up their data on the West Coast," Vogels said. Following the devastating earthquake in Japan a year earlier, more companies there started moving to AWS.

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