How important is location of data to you?

Lets say you had a choice of calling London with several telephone companies. Would the routing these companies take (which country does you call get routed through) feature in your decision criteria? Do you even know that information today? Or are you more interested in factors such as reliability (is the dial tone always there), speed and cost?
The analogy is only useful in so far as it illustrates the relative importance of things like cost, reliability, ease of use, over location. So, would a SMB pay a premium to choose the location of their data?. Probably would if the cheap option was a horrible choice otherwise reputation (branding) of the supplier is probably more interesting as a proxy for security and reliability than having to make a decision about data location. Might be a bit different if the choice was onshore vs offshore but unlikely there would be any science in the decision except that onshore would 'appear' more available and secure. I suspect most SMB's do not have the capability to make a call about the relative merits of international data locations and the price differential is unlikely to be enough to warrant the investigation.

OK Tim, Fair response. To reword...

If an SMB has a choice of two options, both identical except that one allows for geographic location of data to be chosen while the other does not, and there is a premium to be paid (5%, 10% maybe) for the privilege - would customers take up this option???

Personally, I couldn't care less where the data is as long as there's reliable redundancy.

I've looked at clouds from both sides now, From up and down, and still somehow, It's cloud illusions I recall, I really don't know clouds, at all.

Is this not Quora? It sure looks like it, but it asked me to create a new account. Weird.

Ben: I'm less concerned as to where my data is (physically) than I am that once "in the cloud" I have immediate access to it, it is stored securely and does not have a single point of failure should there be an inevitable hardware error where stored.

Guys - good answers. I guess my question is that once a person has already decided upon the cloud, how much does geography come into it?

If your market focus is health care, then data location is critical. Many RFPs require that the data be located within the United States or that the data be exposed to off-shore connections.

Secondly, many decision makers are still dipping their feet into technology and don't like the idea that they can touch or feel their data.

Lastly, security is still a big issue in the health industry and the cloud's architecture are still nebelous enough that their worries about their data are not yet completely refuted.

Location can make or break an experience. Response times for a user based in the U.S. are going to be decreased if your storage is overseas. Outsourcing to another country can open up the door to legal and data continuity issues. Stay local as much as possible.

@Mark Moore - there are actually cloud computing users outside of the US you know (in fact more than IN the US), Why are technology questions always parsed in terms of US users as a default???

I understand that there are cloud computing users outside of the U.S. I framed my response to focus on U.S. users because that country has exponentially more traffic than any other global country. http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/nui/retail/index.html

Mark - that graph is online retail spend. No matter, anyone who looks to US patterns to predict global trend in the future is being short sighted. Of course US traffic is currently very high relative to per capita size - but the rest of the world is getting connectivity very quickly and eventually the location of cloud services will pose an issue there...

Good - glad that we clarified that Ben.

However, I still believe that local (relatively speaking) is better is most every case. Does anyone disagree? If so, why?

Ben, I run into this question all of the time. Where is never as imporant as to redundency, availability and security. Yes, there are some in-country and out-of-country compliance issues, but this continues to re-enforce my feeling that "the Cloud" is still in the early adaptor stage of utilization.

Ben, I assume your question originates from the perspective that cloud service providers will seek to optimize resources through some form of load balancing, in this case the load is on the storage and, hence, the data may end up physically residing in another state, country, planet??, okay, we get the idea. However, your question indicates the state of maturity in cloud computing in that data geography seems to be an issue that needs to be decided in advance of service provider selection instead of as a provisioned facet of service provider selection. It is my hope that as the market matures, the ability to lock data into certain geographies without handcuffing the service provider becomes a provisioned option for the cloud consumer. To answer the question, where data resides geographically is an important facet of service provider selection even if I don't exercise it on certain pieces of data.

Yes it is important. If you know your data and accessability then yes it is important. The closer you have your data to your location the more comfortable you are as it is being stored. Now that begs the question about ease of access of your data. If your data is close but you cannot access it, that is a problem. I would rather factor in ease of access and spread it across the globe if $$$ feasible and Gov. regs allow to occur.

Um, that was my point entirely. Local to the 95% or so of global residents who ARE NOT domiciled in the US...