Does location matter? Or, put another way, is the world no longer flat? Many cloud and SaaS providers work under the assumption that where we store data where it is most efficient from an application performance point of view, ignoring political considerations. This runs counter to many company and governments who care greatly where their data is stored. Have we entered a time where location does matter, not for technical reasons, but for political reasons? Is globalisation (as a political thing) finally starting to impact IT architecture and strategy?
Thomas Friedman‘s book, The World is Flat, contained a number of stories which where real eye openers. The one I remember the most was the McDonald’s drive through. The idea was simple: once you’ve removed direct physical contact from the ordering process, then it’s more efficient to accept orders from a contact centre than from within the restaurant itself. We could event locate that contact centre in a cheaper geography such as another state, or even another country.
Telecommunications made the world flat, as cheap telecommunications allows us to locate work wherever it is cheapest. The opportunity for labour arbitrage this created drove offshoring through the late nineties and into the new millenium. Everything from call centres to tax returns and medical image diagnosis started to migrate to cheaper geographies. Competition to be the cheapest and most efficient service provider, rather than location, determines who does the work. The entire world would compete on a level playing field.
In the background, whilst this was happening, enterprise applications went from common to ubiquitous. Adoption was driven by the productivity benefits the applications brought, which started of as a source of differentiation, but has now become one of the many requirements of being in business. SaaS and cloud are the most recent step in this evolution, leveraging the global market to create solutions operating at such a massive scale that they can provide price points and service levels which are hard, if not impossible, for most companies to achieve internally.
Despite the world being laser levelled within an inch of its life, many companies are finding it difficult to move their operations to the cost-effective nirvana that is cloud and SaaS services. Location matters, it seems. Not for technical reasons, but for political ones.
Where we store our assets is important. Organisations want to put their assets somewhere safe, because without assets these the organisations don’t amount to much. Companies want to keep their information — their confidential trade secrets — hidden from prying eyes. Governments need to ensure they have the trust of their citizens by respecting their privacy. (Not to mention the skullduggery this is international relations.) While communications technology has made it incredibly easy to move this information around and keep it secure, it has yet to solve the political problem of ensuring that we can trust the people responsible for safeguarding our assets. And all these applications we have created — both the traditional on-premesis, hosted or SaaS and cloud versions — are really just asset management tools.
We’re reached a point where one of the a larger hidden assumptions of enterprise applications has been exposed. Each application was designed to live and operate within a single organisation. This organisation might be a company, or it might be a country, or it might be some combination of the two. The application you select to manage your data determines the political boundary it lives within. If you use any U.S. SaaS or cloud solution provider to manage your data, then your data falls under U.S. judicial discovery laws, irregardless of where you yourself are located. If your data transits through the U.S., then assume that the U.S. government has a copy. The world might be flat, but where you store your assets and where you send them still matters.
We can already see some moves by the vendors to address this problem. Microsoft, for example, has developed a dedicated cloud for the U.S. government, known as BPOS Federal, which is designed to meet the government’s stringent security and privacy standards. Amazon has also taken a portion of the cloud it runs and dedicated it to, and located it in, the EU, for similar reasons.
If we consider enterprise applications to be asset management tools rather than productivity tools, then ideas like private clouds start to make a lot of sense. Cloud technology reifies a lot of the knowledge required to configure and manage a virtualised environment in software, eliminating the data centre voodoo and empowering the development teams to manage the solutions themselves. This makes cloud technology simply a better asset management tool, but we need to freedom to locate the data (and therefore the application) where it makes the most sense from an asset management point of view. Sometimes this might imply a large, location agnostic, public cloud. Other times it might require a much smaller private cloud located within a specific political boundary. (And the need to prevent some data even transiting through a few specific geographies – requiring us to move the code to the data, rather than the data to the code – might be the killer application that mobile agents have been waiting for.)
What we really need are meta-clouds: clouds created by aggregating a number of different clouds, just as the Internet is a network of separate networks. While the clouds would all be technically similar, each would be located in a different political geography. This might be inside vs. outside the organisation, or in different states, or even different countries. The data would be stored and maintained where it made the most sense from an asset management point of view, with few technical considerations, the meta-cloud providing a consistent approach to locating and moving our assets within and across individual clouds as we see fit.