Honestly, for us it's a mix. In some ways we don't care. For the services we use to run our business, I'm not terribly concerned about where they exist. We'll rent a service from Salesforce for CRM. We're a Google Apps customer for messaging. For file storage, we use Dropbox wherever those servers live.
For our kind of run-the-business operations, it matters less to me where they are located. Honestly, we find it through whatever service is available and most affordable and solves the business need.
For the services we build and sell to our clients, however, it does matter quite a bit. We have health care clients for whom we build websites, or data collection utilities, or serious video games that have a data back-end component. Those health care clients care very much where those servers live, and are very much concerned about keeping them in Canada.
We have to seek out cloud service providers where we can spin up servers for those clients or where we can guarantee the location. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes that's very hard to pin down, in which case we have to go back to the model of buying a physical server and spinning that up in a facility in Halifax so that I can guarantee to Dalhousie University that in fact the data are here in Halifax.
That's certainly a problem. There are a lot of clients here in Canada who are concerned hearing about Patriot Acts and Obama regulations and watching for data sniffing—things that scare people.
So it's a concern. I think there's a lot of room to clarify some of that mysticism and help us as companies do a better job of communicating that to our clients. It changes every day. We don't have good answers, and I think we certainly need them.