In the new world of clouds and everything-as-service does geography really matter? Your data is 'in the cloud'. Some as-a-service providers won't tell you or at least won't commit to where it is. This position of geography is unimportant might work in some cases but as soon as you try and do something serious it matters, and it matters a lot. Most people have spotted that cloud is just 'someone else's' computer and this means these computers physically exist somewhere outside of the virtual marketing 'cloud'. Location is important for many reasons technical, commercial and legislative.
If you ask a 'techie' why geography is important they'll likely say 'latency'. Fundamentally you can't change the laws of physics and it takes time for light to travel down fibres to where the computer in the cloud is physically located. Factor in the various networking and security kit between point A and B and it really matters. In Europe the various as-a-services data centres are close together from a networking latency point of view. If you start to traverse the Atlantic those milliseconds start to add up quite quickly. As we increasingly assemble solutions built from multiple as-service providers in multiple physical data centres we have to consider geography because of latency and the number of 'hops'. In the bad old days it was easy, everything was sat in the same data centre and the only time you worried about latency was to your secondary site for Disaster Recovery and maybe the odd external interface.
If you ask a 'techie' why geography is important they'll likely say 'latency'. Fundamentally you can't change the laws of physics and it takes time for light to travel down fibres to where the computer in the cloud is physically located. Factor in the various networking and security kit between point A and B and it really matters. In Europe the various as-a-services data centres are close together from a networking latency point of view. If you start to traverse the Atlantic those milliseconds start to add up quite quickly. As we increasingly assemble solutions built from multiple as-service providers in multiple physical data centres we have to consider geography because of latency and the number of 'hops'. In the bad old days it was easy, everything was sat in the same data centre and the only time you worried about latency was to your secondary site for Disaster Recovery and maybe the odd external interface.
There are still real computers ...
Ask a non-techie about geography and you might get someone pointing out that geography means jurisdiction. It is important to understand where your data is stored as well who can access and where from. Data residency is a complicated subject, there is a raft of legislation to comply with as well commercial agreements and sensitivity of end customers to where their data is. The good news here is that as-a-service providers generally tackle this one head on and are very happy to tell you that your data is or isn't in the EU or EEA, for example. For the more paranoid (including those with real reasons to be paranoid) there is also the issue of who has access to the data both officially and otherwise. Clearly geography has a role to play here as does the nationally of the provider.
Of course geography matters ...
Images: ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com and Scanrail1/Shutterstock.com
Of course geography matters ...
Images: ESB Professional/Shutterstock.com and Scanrail1/Shutterstock.com
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