Why Should Retailers Focus on Hybrid Cloud to Increase Profits?

By: Retail CIO Outlook | Friday, October 25, 2019

The retailers can increase their profit margin and provide their customers with personalized experiences if they have the right IT infrastructure and are able to adopt new solutions to keep up with the changing industry and the ever-increasing customer demands.

FREMONT, CA

The retail industry is continuously evolving at a rapid pace, but modern retailers are yet to deliver a superior consumer experience. Consumers expect to get a hassle-free experience while they interact with retail brands. The new digital era has made engagements flawless, and it can be done at any hour of the day and any place. A purchaser might search a new product at home, put that into their digital shopping cart while in office, purchase it from a smart device, and then collect it from a local retail store that same evening. Retailers compete for mindshare and also wallet share across the screens, locations, and time.

To succeed in the omnichannel world, retailers have to use the power of data so that they can stay a step ahead of their competition and predict the desires of the customer even before they realize it themselves. The days of brick-and-mortar being the only touchpoint for purchasing decisions is long gone.

Retailers are expecting promising technologies that will allow them to apply to innovate ways in which applications and services are delivered to their consumers. However, the decision of which infrastructure will be best must be based on the requirement of the applications. The innovation needed by the retailers does not lie in the cloud, but rather in the concept of multiple clouds, which has to be both on-premise and off-premise. The hybrid cloud has the capability to develop, deploy, and operate critical business applications across various public and private cloud environments.

The Current Cloud Landscape

Retailers prefer hybrid cloud as it allows the IT applications to function on the right cloud. For example, workloads that have requirements for security and encryption or even for the applications with rigid performance and availability requirements may run on private clouds. But the unpredictable works, like web tier with changing conditions, might need public clouds.

The hybrid cloud model also proposes solutions that can unify dispersed data and applications in this multi-cloud era. For retailers, clouds live everywhere from the storefront to distribution centers to centralized locations to cloud service providers. The key to managing the dispersed clouds is a solution that is not only elastic and transient but also flexible enough to move between different clouds.

The retailers hesitate to adopt hybrid cloud, regardless of the benefits because of the excessive amount of work to implement it or due to the lack of resources for organizing it. But despite these reasons, trusting and investing will allow the companies to be more flexible so that they can manage resources during busy seasons and also manage their IT spend more efficiently and successfully to create a personalized customer experience.

Scaling With Seasonal Traffic Bursts

For the retailers, holiday and festive seasons are the busiest time as sales increases during this time compared to other seasons. Consumers like to spend during the holiday shopping season. Therefore, it makes the situation critical for the retailers as they have to capitalize on investments during this heavy-traffic period. The elasticity of the hybrid cloud model provides retailers with better access to manage the seasonal traffic outbursts that happen before and during the holidays. Retailers can measure their applications and IT systems according to the demand, and they can scale up or decrease their level according to the resources they need.

Along these lines, retailers can also manage inventory by storing and analyzing the data around customer purchases in a single data platform system. For example, Card stores can conduct real-time inventory tracking and achieve easy and instant access to the stock availability, store orders, and shipping details all through the holiday seasons.

More Control Over IT

To experience digital transformation, companies in every industry are investing more money and resources than ever before, and in many cases, they do it unnecessarily. Retailers need to get more control while executing IT in their stores, and they must invest in technologies that can ensure secure processing, storing, and transmitting of customer credit card data. It is vital to make sure that PCI workloads are run in PCI-compliant environments.

The retailers can gain more control over IT rather than overspending on it is by deploying a hybrid cloud with the right tools to monitor and report on usage and compliance. The model will permit the companies to identify the teams that are driving cloud spend while making sure the teams make data-driven decisions that balance out the necessities and cost. Moving away from on-premise management will also give the time that IT employees need, and these extra hours can be spent on tasks that will generate higher revenues.

Most of the retailers are aware of how IT strategy and execution will impact the customer experience. The acceptance and planned growth of hybrid cloud in retail shows that companies understand that hybrid is one of the best solutions for managing their customer demands while keeping security, flexibility, and costs in line.

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