In the last five years things have changed a lot, our way of buying and working are no longer the same. Right now we are in an increasingly digital world in which online shopping and working in the cloud are becoming more important. Our way of working is also changing a lot, we are doing more and more remote work or teleworking from home. At some point it may be that we have to contract a cloud service for ourselves or our company. In addition to storage space, security measures and benefits, there is one very relevant thing. In this article we are going to talk about why the physical location of the cloud data center is important.
What to look for when hiring a cloud?
Working in the cloud has more and more followers and is a trend that more and more companies and individuals use. One of its main advantages is that it allows us to access our files from any location as long as we have an Internet connection. Also another is that it allows us to save storage space on our computers. That without forgetting the scalability that it offers in which we can expand or reduce services according to our needs, and that also allows us to save costs.
For these reasons, more and more companies are migrating to the cloud where the physical location of the data center plays an important role, as we will see later. However, there are also some sections to consider if we want to choose the cloud well, such as:
- The storage capacity we need.
- The type of cloud we want to implement, whether public, private or hybrid.
- Know what functions we need so as not to contract any that we do not need. This can allow us to save costs.
- It is also convenient to know the prestige of our cloud service provider.
- Whether or not it offers backup restoration capabilities.
Once we know some basic requirements, one of the most important is the physical location of the datacenter, where all our data will be.
Why the physical location of the data center matters
Once we are clear about how we want our cloud service to be, it’s time to get down to work. Here, a very important piece of information is going to be the physical location of the datacenter. Currently in many parts of the world, especially in the most developed countries, they have high-speed fiber optic connections. In that aspect, we can fall into the temptation of wanting to opt for a distant country that offers us a large amount of storage compared to that of our own country. Despite the fact that there is very good infrastructure in that country, if the distance is very great we may have a certain type of latency and our operations will take longer to execute, in addition, the speed could be very low due to all the intermediate routers through which they must pass the data. For example, to get to the physical location of the data center you may have to go through countries with poor Internet infrastructure.
Then also the place where that datacenter is located is very important. In case you don’t know, in the event of a dispute with the data, the legislation where the server is located will govern. In that case, depending on the country, your privacy will be more or less guaranteed. That does not mean that we or our company are obliged to comply with a regulation. In the case of the European Union it is the General Data Protection Regulation whose acronym in English is GDPR. Thus, the physical location of the data center may not coincide with EU regulations and it may not be adapted to Spanish legislation. Therefore, if in the end it ends up not complying with this legislation, the company could be sued and have to pay large fines. In this aspect, it is usually a good decision that the physical location of the datacenter is in the same country as the company or, failing that, that it shares the same legislation.
On the other hand, there is the problem of backups, a very important factor considering the increase in ransomware attacks. Here it must be taken into account that the physical location of the data center can play a crucial role if it is in a remote country. Finally, it would be convenient to have a contingency plan for cyber attacks such as ransomware in which we knew how long it would take to get everything up and running. If it takes a long time, the costs for the company could be very high.
