Faced with the challenge of having to help customers recover their business quickly, Softbank turned on its cloud service for non-profit organisations, government agencies and existing customers, one year ahead of schedule, according to NetApp ASEAN's managing director Scott Morris.

"Softbank asked us, 'how can I put my people back to work, if they can't get to our building to work in? And how do I get my business serving 37 million customers back up and running?" said Morris.

And, where Softbank had previously required a week to deploy 1,000 desktops, with a NetApp agile data infrastructure, they were able to accelerate the pace to deploy 1,000 virtual desktops in a single day and ultimately scaled to 14,000 virtual desktops within two weeks.

With thousands of employees able to work from home, Softbank surpassed government energy targets, cutting its internal energy costs by 39 percent in its corporate headquarters.

The IIIS event took a fresh approach to differentiate itself from the usual technology conferences by incorporating debate sessions between vendors. Playing the role of moderator for these debates was Simon Piff, associate vice president, enterprise infrastructure, IDC Asia/Pacific.