Cloud Infrastructure in Pakistan
The physical location of infrastructure is one prime factor that enterprises overlook when selecting a cloud hosting provider. The ongoing trend is to simply opt for big names in the market who lure you in with eye-catching facts. Especially in Pakistan, one tends to place blind trust in a western product or service. This blog covers how that can be a big mistake for your company, we are carefully explaining in detail the main factors you should consider when selecting your cloud services provider.
Latency:
Enterprise Application data could be coming into your server on a daily basis by thousands of users. Not only the size of this data is huge, but in some cases, the system network gets clogged when every user starts sending data and requests at one particular hour. Computation power, network delay and memory size can play a vital role in that hour to keep the system up and running while giving a seamless experience to users and customers.
In simple terms, latency is the delay between the user’s and system’s correspondence. Greater the distance, the more the delay. Other aspects can be improved with better or costly infrastructure, but latency is highly dependent on physical distance. Tests performed in Pakistan for latency show that cloud infrastructure located outside the country can have a delay of more than 350% compared to cloud infrastructure located within Pakistan (without any use of VPN). When dealing with colossal amounts of data this is a lot.
Data Privacy:
This factor isn’t given much importance in Pakistan because as of now the law is not strict regarding this. However, a new bill for data protection is being drafted (https://www.dawn.com/news/1455963). If this goes through, customer-centric companies will need to be diligent about data privacy laws. By having data within the boundaries of Pakistan, such companies can give a sense of control to their customers over their data that it is safeguarded by their countries law.
Physical Backup:
A cloud service provider has multiple locations where they store copies of their data. Having a cloud infrastructure provider in Pakistan gives the enterprise an edge. They can simply arrange for a hard backup of their data and collect it on disk if needed, while still maintaining multiple soft backups at different locations.
Support:
24/7 support is a common phrase that any service provider uses but having support in the same time zone can prove to be a huge relief for your team. When it comes to large scale enterprise applications, support can be provided even by mobilizing a team to the physical location of the cloud infrastructure in case of upgradation or migration.
Setup:
Setting up cloud hosting initially can be a pain, especially when the company does not want to manage it on their own. Managed cloud service decreases your cost majorly. To have a smooth migration you can opt for a service provider that can guide your team onsite. Local companies allow you to include this in the SLA (Service Level Agreement). This approach is faster and safer because no one wants to do RnD on new systems and they would rather leave it to the experts.
Cost:
Hosting enterprise applications on the cloud can be cost-effective. But the organizations which have unique requirements for particular types of costly servers, this limits them from opting for cloud hosting. There are companies in Pakistan that can buy these servers and provide a very cost-effective monthly plan for their customers so that they don’t have to spend a large amount of cloud infrastructure in a single go.