Look at the attention spans of digital consumers today. They’ve shrunk to the point where 53% of mobile site visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load; a 100-millisecond delay in website load time can cut conversion rates by 7%. When milliseconds of latency can cost companies customers, they’d better have anything in their information technology environment causing lag dialed down as low as possible.

Unfortunately, as many businesses move to cloud, they lose visibility into their computing environments, said Alex Henthorn-Iwane (pictured), vice president of product marketing at ThousandEyes Inc.

“You no longer own the software and the infrastructure and the networks that you’re connecting over, that users are connecting over,” Henthorn-Iwane said. “When you lose that control, you really, really need the visibility so that you can optimize and so you can also fix issues when they happen.”

ThousandEyes provides monitoring software for visibility into the internet, the cloud and networks. It just put out a report that analyzes digital experience in a number of industries, giving customers a way to put their “DX report card” in context.

Henthorn-Iwane spoke with Peter Burris (@plburris), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at theCUBE’s studio in Palo Alto, California. They discussed the report’s findings and how companies can remedy poor digital performance. (* Disclosure below.)

Measuring success

The “2019 Digital Experience Performance Benchmark Report” looked at data on the top 20 websites in retail, media and entertainment and travel and hospitality — 60 sites altogether.

“We looked at things like what correlated to delivering well in terms of the top end,” Henthorn-Iwane said. The company then tried to define an “internet performance bar.”

According to the study, companies should try to hit these numbers or better: DNS should be at 25 milliseconds response time; round-trip latency from user to CDN edge server should be 15 milliseconds; HTTP response time (the time it takes to deliver the first byte on a site) should be 350 milliseconds.

What can companies do if their number are less than ideal? They can contact their cloud or networking providers and hold them accountable, according to Henthorn-Iwane.

“If you give [companies] the kind of visibility that we provide, all this rich data, deep views into the internet — one, you’re going to lower [providers’] defenses, because they’ve got something to work with. Two, they’re actually going to have enough information to do something about it,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations. (* Disclosure: ThousandEyes Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither ThousandEyes nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE