Your customers and employees expect your applications and website to have low latency.   A faster experience is a better experience.  Retailers improve their results with lower latency, while in B2B both your customers and your employees will be notably more productive with lower latency when interacting with both outward facing and internal applications.  

That need for speed should drive Pennsylvania enterprises to AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, right?   After all, they’re spending billions annually on infrastructure so from a latency standpoint it must be a rocket-ride, right?  

Not exactly.  

The assumption that public clouds are always lightning fast is incorrect.  Given equal throughput (which is dependent on your technology and bandwidth) packet latency is determined by the distance between two places, and when you’re using a public cloud provider it is quite likely that the bulk of your traffic will be running back and forth from Ashburn, Virginia.   

While having data traversing the fiber pathways from our area to Ashburn is less daunting than the three-hour, 170-mile drive from Philadelphia, the difference in distance will still impact the performance of your website and applications, if only marginally. 

Latency being a tick slower may not be important for you.  But for many applications it is critical. 

If you have that need for speed, a well-connected data center in Eastern Pennsylvania will provide an advantage over using a major cloud provider.