The importance of the regional cloud
More and more professionals and companies use cloud services as a fundamental tool for work. More and more users and companies are choosing to choose a hybrid cloud, where we have part of the company’s private cloud and also a public cloud from one of the “big” like Google, Microsoft or Amazon. Thanks to the combination of private and hybrid cloud, we will have the best of each world.
One of the main benefits of migrating to the cloud is the ability to minimize the amount of computing and local storage resources that we need. In addition, it offers us greater scalability if we opt for a public or hybrid cloud since it will allow us to increase or reduce resources according to our needs. However, as we will see below, cloud hosting is not a region-independent process. Some think that data hosted on international servers can be moved to where we need it in a very short time, and this is not always true. For this reason, the regional cloud, on many occasions, is constituted as a great alternative.
The influence of location
Choosing our cloud storage is not an easy task. In addition to looking at factors like performance and reliability, we’ll also need to look at legal requirements, as we’ll see later.
The location of our cloud service provider may cause performance and latency issues. In that aspect it is not the same to have a regional cloud in which our data would be in our country or in a nearby country and we would not have problems. On the contrary, if we opt for a cloud located on another continent, even if it is cheaper, we may have more or less serious difficulties with our performance and latency. Perhaps you may be interested in some tips so that your data in the cloud is not stolen.
The further away we are from the datacenter where all the data is going to be stored, the higher latency we will have because all the data must cross dozens of routers and trunk links to reach the destination. In addition, we will also have a lower speed because the peering and transit agreements that our operator has come into play, and also different delays due to going through so many routers.
GDPR compliance
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is changing the way in which citizens of the European Union have the right to have their personal data protected. With the introduction of a regulatory framework such as the GDPR, the movement of sensitive personal information out of EU member states is also controlled.
Data may be transferred outside the EU, provided that the transferring and controlling company implements appropriate security measures to protect the information of EU residents. In case you do not know, the place where our cloud service provider is located will be governed by the legislation of that country.
The GDPR is one of the strictest regulations regarding data protection. If in Spain we opt for a cloud service located in another country that is not in the EU, we can have serious problems. In this aspect, the data of our clients may not be stored in a correct way, in which their data protection is guaranteed. For this reason, a regional cloud storage is a good solution to avoid problems.
Choosing our cloud provider
When choosing our cloud provider, we must do so with criteria based on location, security, compliance, space offered, performance and price. Location and compliance are intimately linked, a very large distance can cause us to have high latency. On the other hand, depending on the location of the server, one legislation or another will govern, and if we have not done things well, we will face sanctions. In this aspect, storage in a regional cloud located in Spain or another EU country that complies with the GDPR can save us more than one scare.
In addition, we should not stop looking at aspects such as security, hardware and the connection of that server together with the cloud space offered. Finally, we will have to take stock in relation to the economic cost and see which one suits us best. Taking into account that today we are migrating from a 100% public cloud of the main companies, and a hybrid cloud, the distance from the server or the speed is not so important, because the private cloud will be in charge of caching all the files that we are going to upload, something that was not possible before.
