While a contemporary surge in the popularity of cloud computing might appear to have made physical server locations an afterthought, cloud data center locality still remains a key consideration when deploying software in the cloud.

What are cloud data centers?

Cloud data centers are large, physical collections of servers deployed by host organizations in strategic regions around the world. By deploying applications to a cloud data center, client organizations can reduce the overhead costs associated with on-premises server purchasing and maintenance, and they can rapidly scale server bandwidth to meet increases (or decreases) in traffic on their websites and web applications with relative ease.

How do cloud data center regions impact organizations?

There are several reasons why it’s important for organizations to consider the specific region(s) of the cloud data center(s) they deploy on.

First and foremost, the location of a data center relative to an organization’s client servers (internal or external) has a direct impact on client request latency. All things being equal, the further a client server is located from the data center serving its request, the slower that request will be served, and the closer the client server is located from the data center serving its request, the faster that request will be served. While the latency differences between individual requests to nearby and distant data centers might at times appear negligible, the negative impact of distance on request latency becomes very apparent when high volumes of requests are made. The cumulation of high latency times per request stacks quickly and accumulates in a sub-par experience for client servers.

Local data regulations in various countries and/or specific industries (e.g., healthcare) also play a key role in determining which data center regions a given organization is allowed to use. In regulatory scenarios where client data isn’t permitted to travel past a certain regional boundary, it’s critical to ensure client requests only travel to data center resources within their permitted regional boundary. This means organizations must identify viable cloud data center regions per their specific regulatory requirements before deploying software with any cloud provider.

One other impactful consideration is regional data center redundancy. If a regional data center fails for any reason – whether that be the result of a power outage or any other disruptive event – understanding the location of backup data center regions can help clarify the temporary change in service standards that client servers will experience while the regional data center undergoes repairs.

Regional deployments in Cloudmersive data centers

Cloudmersive offers Managed Instance deployments (dedicated, single-tenant infrastructure) on its own in-house data centers as a full SaaS, turn-key solution. These deployments are customizable and highly scalable with no pre-set limits, licensed per core per year.

The below image identifies all currently available Cloudmersive data center regions:

For additional information on Cloudmersive data center regions & Managed Instance deployments, please do not hesitate to reach out to a member of our sales team.