In The Economist last week, Richard Koo – the Chief Economist at the Nomura Research Institute tried to estimate the likely impact of the magnitude 9.0 earthquake that hit the Japanese coast on March 11th. Based on projected damage to the country’s electricity supply from the initial quake, tsunami and subsequent nuclear power plant issues, Koo suggested that Japan’s GDP might shrink by as much as 6 percent following the disaster. That’s a major blow to any economy, and one that will require enormous effort to recover.

For the survivors in the city of Sendai and its surrounding coastal region, now dealing with the loss of loved ones, homes and livelihoods, the immediate prospect is – of course - bleak. Despite this, Western journalists have been impressed by the stoicism and determination displayed by the local population. There’s a Japanese proverb that translates as ‘fall down seven times, get up eight’, and we’re certainly seeing this resilience in how Japanese people have behaved in the face of catastrophe.

"In addition to virtualisation and cloud computing, hosting is the third major element that is playing a key role helping organisations to evolve their IT infrastructure from an inflexible computing resource into a next generation service delivery platform. Hosting can mean lots of different things to different people - depending where you’re coming from. Consumers use their ISPs to host personal webpages, small businesses might use a hosting service to support a transactional e-commerce system, while larger organisations can take advantage of a larger managed service partner with a network of data centres to look after their complex, multi-site, multi-country IT requirements."

"According to leading analyst firms such as Gartner, cloud computing is the number one technology area that IT departments should focus on during 2010 – that’s up from a third place ranking in 2009, when virtualisation and business intelligence were considered to be more important."

"Given the fact that malicious malware, phishing sites and fake anti-virus software programs are becoming more sophisticated and proliferating at a record pace, it’s hardly surprising that analysts such as Gartner predict that security software and services spending will outpace all other IT areas in 2010."

"The changes in the way in which we live and interact with others is a constant fascination to me. I have been in the technology industry for 25 years and have seen trends come and go. But only in the last decade can I honestly say that I now see how close home and business life has become, how intertwined and inseparable our days are, and how the expectation of ‘on demand’ availability – even as a person, is expected."

"Having joined Maxima just over 4 months ago, I am now fully into the reality of running the core business operations. My initial impressions of a company with strong underlying capability and a sound financial platform offering excellent growth potential, remains.

But, common with many organisations, Maxima faces challenging trading conditions which have hindered its progress. Many projects and contracts have been delayed, reduced in size, postponed or even cancelled and decision-making processes are frequently being prolonged. Despite these issues, our customers remained loyal to our brand and we achieved many contract and project wins."