The Critical Importance of Latency in Networks in general, in Clouds in particular
Even the most casual customers today expect and demand relatively quick load times. Therefore, whenever a network is bottlenecked and latency issues rear their ugly head, frustration quickly follows. But when that latency appears in your network and affects your mission critical business operations, the frustration can become much more severe, as latency can have a significant effect on your bottom line.
To put the problem of latency in perspective, let’s examine some eye-opening data arrived at in recent research conducted by Gomez and Akamai:
- 47 percent of consumers expect a website to load in two seconds or less.
- 40 percent of consumers will abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load.
- 79 percent of consumers who have a bad experience shopping on a website won’t return to that website for future purchases.
- 52 percent of consumers say a quick website is vital to customer loyalty.
- 44 percent of consumers who have a bad experience shopping online will let their peers know about it.
- For every one second delay experienced by a consumer, there’s a corresponding 16 percent decrease in customer satisfaction.
The research paints a bleak picture: If an e-commerce site brings in $100,000 a day, a page delay of merely one second could impact yearly sales by as much as $2.5 million.
In addition to that data, Google reported that adding a half-second to search page load time decreased traffic by 20 percent. Amazon determined each 100ms of latency decreases sales by one percent. Latency issue in mobile e-commerce is even critical as detailed here.
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On the other hand, technological innovation in the financial industry has allowed some traders to reap substantial savings during the acquisition of stocks. That’s because their networks, which have low latency, allow them to purchase stocks very quickly. Slower-moving investors are forced to pay more for the same stocks.
With all these figures in mind, it goes without saying that the more latency there exists in your Cloud-based infrastructure, the less successful your business will be. This is why it is of the utmost importance to control latency as much as you can, minimizing it whenever possible. Less latency means your application will benefit from improved performance and correspondingly your business will benefit from satisfied customers.