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Cloud Computing: Could Latency Kill the User Experience
Forget cloud computing security issues for a minute. What about latency? What about the potential painful user experience of excruciatingly long waits? Relatively cheap and universal broadband connectivity seems to have removed latency as a problem that is often even comes to mind when discussing cloud computing. That is until you try to access your business applications on the road from your hotel room.
A report by Forrester advices companies to be wary of potential latency issues before moving ahead with any cloud computing initiatives. The report found that “end user performance will only be high for users who have geographic proximity to the cloud data centre or who are directly resident on the networks that are interconnected at this data center.”
Those users not in a direct line access to the data center can be affected adversely. Both data encryption and transfer speeds can combine to provide slower responses. Cloud computing tries to minimize latencies, but it they can never go to zero. But really the impact of latency also has a lot to do with the type of application and the amount of data being stored with it.
For example, Chris Seller, Quantas Airline’s CIO, commented that cloud computing in Australia is being held back because most cloud-based services have hosting centers outside of Australia, and when dealing with large data sets, the transfer latency from these services is just too slow.
Beyond geography, the Forrester report also mentions the location of data centers as considerations for both legal and cultural reasons. Often, especially in Europe, the movement of personal information outside of the country in which the citizen resides is not allowed. Additionally, culture and perceptions are such that the knowledge of data being stored far from the location from where the data was collected is not acceptable.
So while cloud computing is all about virtualization and abstraction of data, we still may not be able to totally erase our ties to geography and location when it comes to storing data.
