Capterra Glossary
Latency
Latency refers to the delay time it takes for data to travel from one location to another in a network, such as a computer to a printer. A network with low latency is fast, and a network with high latency is slow. Latency is measured in milliseconds, and latency thresholds have shrunk over time. This has occurred as technology and computers have become more and more responsive. Latency is affected by various factors, including the speed and bandwidth of a network.
What Small and Midsize Businesses Need to Know About Latency
Latency is important for small businesses because it impacts the speed of day-to-day operations. If latency is high, it can cause bottlenecks in the network which means devices are communicating slower. This could result in an email that's slow to send or a screen share that is slow to load.
Related Terms
- Synchronous
- Software as a Service (SaaS)
- Intranet
- Security Orchestration, Automation and Response (SOAR)
- Identity and Access Management (IAM)
- Managed Service Provider (MSP)
- Haptics
- WAN (Wide-Area Network)
- Service-oriented Architecture (SOA)
- Augmented Reality (AR)
- Chief Information Officer (CIO)
- Security Information and Event Management (SIEM)
- Platform as a Service (PaaS)
- Service-Level Agreement (SLA)
- Scalability
- Data Center
- Authorization
- Multitenancy