In the past few years, we’ve worked with Nolan Goldberg, Proskauer’s Senior Counsel for IP & Technology at a variety of conferences. Nolan is a breath of fresh air in an all-too-often hyperbolic cloud industry, offering carefully reasoned arguments and opinions grounded in the rule of law.

He wasn’t able to make the Strata conference earlier this year due to storms in New York, so he spent his time writing an extensively researched piece on e-discovery, big data, and the law. It’s been published in the National Law Journal. We’re distributing it here with permission from the April 11, 2011 edition of the National Law Journal, but unlike other content available from Bitcurrent, further duplication without permission is prohibited. If you’d like information on using this article, contact 877-257-3382 or reprints@alm.com or visit www.almeprints.com.

Nolan will be joining David Snead at this year’s Interop conference in Las Vegas to tackle the thorny subject of cloud computing SLAs and terms of service on May 12.

This report looks at roughly 300 million individual tests of nine cloud platforms, conducted over a seven-day period. Cedexis, a company that measures Internet health through browser instrumentation in order to optimize its customers’ use of clouds and CDNs, shared the data with us.

This is dense stuff; we’re distributing it under a Creative Commons license, and we ask that you attribute us when you re-use it. In addition to data about cloud performance from almost every country and service provider, the report also shows which clouds perform best from which regions.

Some quick takeaways:

• Regional effects matter tremendously, and the difference between countries can be significant.
• ƒDirecting a regional client to the correct regionalized zone for a cloud provider does improve performance.
• The average time to complete an HTTP request and receive a response, worldwide, was 426.4 milliseconds. The average availability worldwide was 97.69%.
• ƒWhile most cloud providers had roughly similar average availability, a closer analysis of percentiles shows that the worst-served visitors fared very differently. This underscores the importance of doing proper analysis on performance data.
• End user information is an important complement to synthetic testing. While the results aren’t as consistent, they provide insight into the conditions of far-flung end users across a broad spectrum of networks and countries.
• ƒGiven variance in cloud performance and availability by region and by day, it makes sense for serious cloud users to hedge their bets, and find ways to arbitrate cost and service quality across providers.

As with other studies we’ve published, this one was sponsored by Cedexis, who also gave us access to their raw data. They didn’t have any editorial input into the content; as with other firms with whom we’ve published research—Citrix, Coradiant, and Neustar Webmetrics—Cedexis is a proponent of sharing data that advances the understanding of emerging technologies. We’re big fans of this approach to marketing, and thank them for their support.

SIDENOTE: When we first published this study on March 3, 2011, we let Google know that we’d calculated a significantly lower percentage availability for Google App Engine than other cloud providers. We let the folks at Google know, and the App Engine team looked into the situation. They helped us investigate the problem, which initially seemed like a billing problem. The team worked closely with Bitcurrent and Cedexis, and we’ve updated our study with a detailed analysis of that discussion. The short version: there’s a big difference between what App Engine sees as availability, and what end users see; and that experience is significantly worse for certain countries.

Earlier this month, we surveyed roughly 150 IT professionals, analysts, cloud proponents, and end users for their thoughts on cloud computing. The main purpose of the study was to look at the motivations for, and obstacles to, cloud adoption; and to see if there are correlations between these and specific industries, company types, or company sizes.

While the data is instructive, the sample size for some responses is not statistically significant, and warrants further research. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that for vendors, tailoring their benefits and concerns to their audiences may be helpful; and for IT buyers, understanding how their top issues compare to their peers in other industries may offer a more nuanced perspective on the move to cloud.

For a long time, IT operators have relied on the health of the infrastructure to decide whether their applications are functioning properly. That’s changing, as more and more of what we do relies on fast, consistent user experience.

It’s been hard to justify performance improvement simply on the basis of “it should be fast.” But in the last year, there’s been considerable research showing that faster applications lead to better revenues, more productive employees, and higher conversion rates.

This report looks at some of this evidence, and makes a case for tying performance as observed by actual end users to business outcomes such as contribution, conversion rates, and engagement.

This report is based on data from Strangeloop Networks—for whom we have consulted in the past— and sponsored by Coradiant, for whom Alistair Croll worked and in which he maintains an equity stake. Neither Strangeloop nor Coradiant had any editorial input into the content, and the opinions are purely our own. We’re tremendously grateful to companies like Citrix, Webmetrics, and others who’ve chosen to help advance the discussions of cloud computing in this open, nonpartisan way.