Shoppers often don’t realise delivering their holiday wish-list is dependent upon myriad cloud services used by retailers, e-commerce operators, banks, and logistics companies that enable purchasing. Without the right cloud strategies and investments in place, there is a very real risk that these organisations will be unable to scale and remain resilient and secure in the face of growing digital demand – especially during peaks like the holiday season. Failing to consider these factors can lead to outages, missed orders, long delivery delays, customer data breaches, and very unhappy customers.
O’Reilly’s 2021 Cloud Adoption Survey found that cloud adoption has continued to grow, with 90% of respondents indicating that their organisations use cloud computing. Fortunately for shoppers, retail & ecommerce were among the industries with the highest cloud use. Perhaps this isn’t so surprising, considering retail is really where the cloud took off: AWS began when Amazon started selling “excess capacity” in its data centers. But that doesn’t mean retailers can lower their guard just yet.
As we approach Black Friday, this becomes more apparent than ever. If your ecommerce site slows to a crawl under heavy load, you lose sales. No CIO wants to build an on-premises data center that can handle 100x changes in load. The cloud is an ideal solution to that problem. Beyond the holidays, enterprises in retail and beyond must ensure they invest in the best cloud tools and strategies for their business. When you weigh the associated costs with cloud investments, it far outweighs the risk of possible outages and interruptions to service on traditional on-premises systems that can’t handle a heavy load or spike in traffic.