In a distributed organisation, latency isn’t just a technical nuisance.
It affects employee productivity, application responsiveness, and customer experience.
If you’re managing cloud infrastructure or internal networks across multiple Australian office locations, or even international branches, you’ve likely asked:
“What’s the best way to reduce latency between sites without blowing out the budget?”
The answer depends on your architecture, workload type, and connectivity, but the principles remain consistent: bring applications closer to users, streamline your network path, and avoid unnecessary hops or bottlenecks.
Here’s a breakdown of the most effective strategies.
If your users in different locations are accessing centralised workloads (like file servers, line-of-business apps, or VDI), latency builds up fast, especially over public internet routes.
One solution is to deploy hyper-converged infrastructure (HCI) or edge nodes at remote sites.
These act as mini data centres, allowing workloads to run closer to users.
Example:
An engineering firm with offices in Brisbane, Townsville, and Darwin placed HCI nodes in each region to host AutoCAD and document collaboration tools. This cut average latency from 90ms to under 20ms, improving load times and user satisfaction.
When to use this:
Apps are latency-sensitive (e.g. CAD, VDI, VoIP, SQL-based apps)
Offices are in regions where internet routing is unpredictable
You want on-shore sovereignty with performance control
Public internet routing can introduce packet loss, jitter, and unpredictable latency between sites.
Instead, use:
Private fibre links between branches and your data centre or cloud region
SD-WAN to intelligently route traffic over multiple links (MPLS, LTE, NBN) based on real-time performance
Point-to-point Layer 2 Ethernet if your offices are metro-based
Why SD-WAN works:
It provides central control, bandwidth aggregation, traffic prioritisation (QoS), and can auto-switch to the best-performing route. This is particularly valuable across Australia’s fragmented connectivity landscape.
Latency isn’t just about the pipe, it’s about where the destination is. If you’re running Australian branch offices but hosting your applications in US-based AWS or Azure regions, you’re adding 150–250ms of unnecessary delay.
To optimise:
Host latency-sensitive apps in on-shore private cloud regions (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane)
Use multi-region architecture with regional failover
Avoid "data gravity" bottlenecks by localising compute for apps that don’t need to be centralised
Tip: Some public cloud providers allow you to pin workloads to an Australian zone, but still introduce variability due to multi-tenancy. A private cloud alternative gives more consistent performance.
If your branches are reading large volumes of the same content (e.g. files, videos, dashboards), use caching or a private CDN to reduce round trips to the main server.
Tools like:
Azure Front Door / AWS CloudFront (for public cloud)
Varnish or NGINX (for private-hosted apps)
DFS-R or cloud sync tools (for file shares)
…can all reduce latency for repeat content.
You can’t optimise what you don’t measure.
Deploy tools like:
ThousandEyes, NetBeez or Obkio for active latency monitoring
iPerf or SmokePing for internal link tests
Traceroute-style diagnostics to find routing issues
Set benchmarks between branches and against hosted app regions. Track changes after each optimisation to prove ROI.
| Strategy | Best Use Case |
|---|---|
| Edge HCI nodes | Regional offices running latency-sensitive apps |
| Private fibre or SD-WAN | Branches needing consistent, predictable connections |
| On-shore private cloud hosting | Sovereignty + local responsiveness |
| Caching/CDN | Content-heavy or read-heavy apps |
| Monitoring tools | Baseline and benchmark for continuous improvement |
There’s no single “switch” to optimise latency across offices. It’s about intelligent workload placement, network design, and performance visibility.
If you’re running multi-site infrastructure and want to improve speed, reliability, and user satisfaction without adding complexity, a blend of private cloud and edge HCI is often the most effective solution.
Need help evaluating the options for your branch network?
Book a call with our infrastructure team to map out your architecture and identify where low-latency improvements will deliver the biggest impact.
