Asking the right questions for latency

One of the key concerns with cloud-based hosting is latency. As organizations quickly find, latency isn’t just an issue outside the data center anymore.

Most mission-critical apps don’t deal well with latency. They just don’t. It’s like throwing tequila shots into the middle of your night out – not pretty. That’s why most of the time you hear about disaster recovery or testing and development when you hear about the cloud.

But that doesn’t need to be the case – at least once you focus on the RIGHT cloud providers – who have the low latency you need to maintain high application performance.

To get it, you need to think about where a provider’s cloud nodes are actually located. You know… in the real world.

Ensuring cloud vendors have nodes spanning every major US geography ensures that latency is essentially a non-issue, which makes it possible to host mission-critical or latency-sensitive apps in the cloud. Can your cloud provider say the same thing? Or did they get one data center on the East Coast, one on the West Coast, and call it a day.

Do you think online retailers have one warehouse where they store EVERYTHING they sell?

No. Having multiple centers across the country to helps products reach their final destinations quickly and reliably. It’s the same way with your data.

This is why discussions about cloud services can’t move toward the one-size-fits-all model.

There is no “magic set of five configurations” that will work for every cloud application. So if your vendor only talks in RAID types, then they’re missing the boat when it comes to production applications.