Keeping it local: Your friendly neighbourhood cloud-provider

As a consumer, you tend not to worry about where the applications you are accessing are running from: you shop on Amazon, store music in iCloud, and as long as it works you are happy. Yet as a business, there are other considerations that you must take into account. For example, companies looking to move to an Infrastructure as a Service model with servers hosted in a public cloud, may find that the location of the datacentre can have an impact. While the cloud allows you to host your servers from any location across the globe, the datacentre location of your chosen cloud provider can impact significantly on business performance, and here’s why.

Without delay
The key issue is latency, which relates to the time it takes for an electric or optical signal to travel along a length of cable. Latency can cause noticeable variations in speeds when trying to send data; it stands to reason that a signal travelling from one thousand miles away will take longer to reach its destination than a signal travelling from one mile away. Although you can scale up memory and processing power in the cloud, the overall speed of access to your cloud application will still be largely determined by the size of the data ‘pipe’ available in the region (capacity); whether fibre or copper cabling is used (conductivity), and the length of that cable. Latencies can vary from <5ms across the same city to >300ms across continents. Very low latency (<5ms) is only a real factor of consideration for financial organisations needing to-the-millisecond accuracy of their computer system, but as adoption of cloud services grows, the need for reasonable latency (<50ms) is affecting a greater range of businesses.

Latency was a key consideration for one of our customers, team building business Sandstone; which needed to create a bespoke online team building event using videoconferencing and instant messaging. The exercise brought together over 100 participants from disparate regions across the Americas, and they needed to be sure that communication was in real time. Hosting the service using our local datacentres was therefore a must.

Letter of the law
The location of your cloud servers doesn’t just have implications for the performance of IT; it can also have a significant legal impact on the wider business. There are number of different laws and regulations around the data you hold. For example, privacy laws in the EU require that personal data held on EU citizens must be hosted in the EU.

There are also individual country laws that apply globally; for example the recently proposed controversial SOPA legislation, put forward in the US. Under the proposals, the US government would have the right to seize a company’s servers (cloud hosted or otherwise) if they even suspect that they are hosting any copyrighted content. This controversial legislation has led some businesses to reconsider hosting their cloud servers in the US for fear of government interference. In fact, one of our customers, legal technology consultant Ellwood, felt that the mere threat of the upcoming legislation was enough reason to seek out a datacentre outside of US jurisdiction. Ellwood works with legal firms for whom data protection is a highly sensitive issue. Bearing this in mind, they wanted to be sure that they were hosting their data in a region where there was no threat of government intrusion and so choose to use our datacentres in Canada.

Going global
If you are a global business you need to deliver a consistent level of service to all your customers. While choosing several cloud providers with data centres in every major region might help to address the latency and regulation issues; it could create headaches from a logistical standpoint: these providers may also have very different SLAs and guarantees of service from one another. Therefore, having one cloud provider with a presence in several regions can go a long way to ensuring that you receive the same seamless performance and resiliency as having your IT in-house, as well as the additional benefits cloud has to offer.

In short, while the flexibility, elasticity and anywhere, anytime access of cloud is a huge draw for businesses, companies still need to be conscious of where these services are being delivered from. Whether availability and uptime, speed of service, data protection, or consistency are your major business concerns; knowing where your cloud services are hosted and delivered from could have a big impact on your business. As such, when selecting a new partner, make sure you know where your cloud comes down to earth, it could make more of a difference than you think.