As a tech marketer, I spend my days preaching that latency impacts business performance. The stat that is most commonly passed around the tech community is that 100ms of latency costs Amazon 1% in sales - a statement that was published almost a decade ago when people were 4,000% times more patient with the internet (okay, I made that last stat up, but it’s true). This is all powerful information, but I was admittedly a little judgmental about the tolerance level of society on load times. Until last week.

I was trying to show my friend a very important video. I built up the storyline: my kid did something hysterical, I magically caught it on camera, it’s going to go viral, wait until you see it. Then…buffering. As we waited and waited, the smile slowly melted off our faces and this long-awaited video became an awkward lull in the room. “Forget it,” I said “it’s not that funny” (it was).

I looked at her sadly, whispered “latency matters” and walked out of her kitchen. I think four seconds had passed.

Now let’s talk about your business. I’m not proud, but I gave up on a video of my child in four seconds. What do you think your employees and customers are doing with a slow-loading app? Apteligence reports that 48% of users uninstall or stop using an app if it’s slow. That is almost half of your users, gone.

Here’s the punchline: the way you connect to your cloud providers can make or break application performance. The two primary connectivity methods businesses use are as follows:

• The public internet: If you are connecting to AWS, Microsoft, or any cloud provider over the public internet from your data center, you are hoping that your critical data will take the most efficient route possible and not hit any obstacles along the way. We actually created a game with a little data hero to demonstrate what your data packets are experiencing (to really drive the point home, I debated creating a game that randomly froze when you were doing well, but I’m not a monster). Long story short, it’s unpredictable.
• Direct cloud interconnect: The alternative is that you can directly connect to one of these cloud providers using a connection that guarantees consistent throughput and performance - meaning it takes the most efficient route, every time. We did a ping test to a cloud provider using a direct cloud interconnect vs. the public internet and found that on average it reduced latency 44%. I’d make a game around that too, but it would pretty much just be the data hero guy running really fast in a straight line.

At the end of the day, #2 vastly improves application performance, and surprisingly, it is also more cost-effective than #1.

No matter the industry, business is done online. Email, CRMs, portals, websites, advertising, financial systems – the list goes on. The way you connect to these platforms may make the difference between a productive employee and an unengaged employee. Or, the difference between a buying customer and a prospect that goes to your competitor.

How are you connecting to your cloud providers? If you want to learn more, check out our eBook on the top 5 benefits of directly connecting your hybrid cloud solution.