Response Time and Availability
It took us six chapters to just skim the surface of response time and availability. To recap briefly, response time can be greatly improved by the cloud in two ways: a reduction in network latency via globally dispersed instances and a reduction in processing time via a high degree of parallel processing. Availability can also be enhanced by the cloud through maintenance of replicas of the data and the ability to call additional resources into service due to a demand spike or to recover from an outage on an emergency basis.
Although it is conceivable that, for some applications, these architectural benefits could be replicated via owned data centers or via infrastructure services, using a SaaS provider is likely to be easier. We expect a search engine or social networking site to work, hassle free.
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