When dealing with cloud technology there is a phrase that everybody should remember: Physics Always Wins. There isn’t any way to get around the speed of light (2.98 x 108 m/s) other than getting as close to your cloud resources as possible. I believe that Microsoft does a great job about having data centers in strategically placed regions to help get you to your resources as quickly as possible. When it comes to latency, it’s pretty simple. The further away you are from the data center, the higher the latency. The closer you are, the better latency you’ll get.