Retailers See the Light in the Cloud

Analysts remain resolutely bullish on the cloud for the retail sector, and not just for commerce apps; core business applications such as ERP are prime candidates for cloud delivery. Forrester published a new report, “It’s Cloud Go Time for Retailers: Cloud Apps and Platforms Offer More Rewards Than Risks for Retail,” and the subtitle really says it all.

As retailers’ initial concerns around reliability, security and control over business-critical data have steadily decreased, the balance of risk and reward has tilted in favour of the latter as vendors have extended and improved their products.

Here are a few reminders of the cloud’s most appealing features. With the right cloud provider, retailers can:

• Easily scale up or down. The cloud’s on-demand, pay-as-you-go delivery model lets you adjust capacity to your business cycles and growth – a very useful capability when it comes to tax filing crunch time.
• Access advanced services and analytics. Since cloud vendors can spread infrastructure costs over many users, they can offer services that would be prohibitively expensive for individual users to develop in-house. The range of offerings is vast, from project management to advanced analytics to artificial intelligence, and they’re a lot easier to deploy and upgrade than most on-premises apps.
• Ensure high availability and fast recovery. Cloud computing vendors provide very high levels of reliability. In addition, users in companies of all sizes can partner with a cloud vendor or multiple providers to build backup and recovery plans with levels of redundancy and replication that were once available only to very large organisations.

Things move fast in the cloud world; if your organisation hasn’t investigated the benefits for a while, now is the time to take another look.