by Joseph Brady, Director of Business Development and Cloud Alliance Leader at Treehouse Software, Inc.
I have recently been taking some classes in preparation for an AWS certification. In some of these classes, an example scenario has been used that speaks to an issue I’ve often heard mentioned by Treehouse mainframe customers–that of “Regional Data Sovereignty”. For example, a customer might have government compliance requirements that financial information in Frankfurt cannot leave Germany, and many other countries have similar restrictions and regulatory controls in place.
Fortunately, Regional Data Sovereignty is a critical part of the design of AWS Global Infrastructure. Within this infrastructure, there are AWS Regions which address data that is subject to local laws and statutes of the country in which a Region is located. With the understanding that the customer’s data and application live and runs in various geographical Regions, there are four business factors a customer should consider when choosing a Region:
- Compliance. Before any other factors, customers must first look at their regional compliance requirements to determine if data must live within certain geographical boundaries.
- Proximity. How close the enterprise is to its customer base is another major factor because of possible latency issues between countries. Locating a Region closest to the customer base is generally the best choice.
- Feature availability. Sometimes the closest Region may not have all the AWS features a business needs. Every year thousands of new features and products specifically to answer customer requests and needs are released by AWS. But sometimes those new services require new physical hardware that AWS has to build, so the service might be available one Region at a time.
- Pricing. Even when the hardware is equal from one Region to the next, some locations are more expensive in which to operate. For example, the same workload in Sao Paulo could be significantly more expensive than if it is run out of Oregon in the United States.
Additionally, events such as natural disasters, can happen to cause customers to lose connection to a data center, so a High Availability (HA) cutover plan should also be considered. The customer can run a second data center, but real estate prices alone could restrict that when considering all the duplicate expense of hardware, employees, electricity, heating and cooling, and security. Most businesses simply end up just storing backups somewhere, and then hope for the disaster to never come. And “hope” is not a good business plan. I recently covered how Treehouse Software can help provide an HA framework for mainframe customers in another blog.
Let’s take a look at the AWS Global Infrastructure and how its Regions are distributed worldwide…
AWS Regions are built to be closest to the highest business traffic demands, such as in Paris, Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Dublin, and Ohio. Inside each Region, there are multiple data centers that have all the compute, storage, and other services customers need to run their applications. By utilizing AWS Regions for high availability of its business services, customers can be assured of minimal downtime of operations. Regions can be connected to each other through the high-speed AWS Direct Connect, which bypasses the public Internet, and the customer’s business decision maker chooses which Region they want to use. Each Region is isolated from every other Region in the sense that absolutely no data goes in or out of the customer’s environment in that Region without explicit permission for that data to be moved. These elements should be part of all critical strategic and security conversations when planning global distribution and availability of an enterprise’s data on AWS.
Video – AWS Global Infrastructure explained…
Contact Treehouse Software today to discuss your project, or to schedule a demo of our Mainframe-to-AWS real-time and bi-directional data replication solution.
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