Why You Need to Pay Attention to Where Your SaaS Solutions Live

There is a famous line from The Godfather: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.” That might be good advice for businessmen, politicians, and gangsters. In the cloud, however, it is your data and your SaaS solutions that you want to keep as close as possible, and for several distinct reasons. The top reasons are the sovereignty, latency, and security of your data.

1. Data Sovereignty

The primary reason to care about where your SaaS solutions are hosted is data sovereignty. Increasingly, countries are paying more attention to where the data of their citizens is stored.

The European Union enacted GDPR specifically to address this issue. If you do business with European countries, you may need to keep data about users from those countries in a country-specific data center. It’s not just a good idea; it could be the law.

2. Data Latency

The other reason to pay attention to where your SaaS solution runs is latency, which is a fancy term for response time. Back in the old days, when all of your employees were in the same building as your data center, you rarely had to worry about the time between clicking a mouse button and getting a result.

Now that users can connect to data from anywhere in the world, the distance between them and your data can be significant, and that leads to poor latency. For example, using a SaaS provider in the USA when most of your users are in Europe could lead to unacceptable performance.

3. Data Security

Finally, another reason to consider where your SaaS runs is Security. Federal Government institutions often need to adhere to FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program) standards based on NIST 800-53. This means the average SaaS solutions aren’t considered secure enough for government work.

Keep in mind that FedRAMP can be a requirement for government contractors as well, not just federal agencies. A highly secure SaaS offering, with extra compliance as well as high availability and threat detection, is a must for organizations working with sensitive data.

SaaS Solutions That Meet Data Sovereignty, Latency, and Security Needs

The good news is that CloudCheckr is unique among cloud management platform SaaS providers. CloudCheckr operates distinct SaaS solutions in North America, in the European Union, and in Australia. CloudCheckr is also available in an environment that runs exclusively on AWS GovCloud resources. To meet even more stringent security requirements, CloudCheckr has a FedRAMP In-Process offering.

Whether your overriding concern is data sovereignty or performance, the closer your data is to your users, the better. Where your SaaS provider hosts your data and runs their SaaS solutions matters. Additionally, local data sovereignty can be a competitive advantage.

Data Sovereignty and Security for Highly Regulated Industries

Learn more about CloudCheckr CMx Federal, our FedRAMP In-Process cloud management solution for government organizations.