The Gartner Group has explicated cloud computing as “a style of computing in which massively scalable IT-related capabilities are provided ‘as a service’ using Internet technologies to multiple external customers.” With the arrival of Salesforce.com in 1999, the idea of cloud computing came to the fore and since then a lot has been done in this field. Its strength can be judged from the fact that it’s predicted that Cloud’s deployment will be in default by 2020. An area which is hugely benefitting from cloud computing is e-commerce. There are myriad of advantages e-commerce is drawing from cloud computing today. Cloud computing in e-commerce enables the business to look big virtually and operate extensively.
Cloud Computing enables an e-commerce application to cater to the changing demand and scenarios of the market. It allows to upscale or downscale the services according to the demand, traffic, and seasonal spikes. Cloud provides the scalable architecture your business needs. The fact that your business will increase in the coming time, it is vital to scale the business as it grows. For example- Magento with POWER8 is specially designed for the e-commerce platforms to provide a great deal of scalability and performance. The POWER8 architecture and memory utilization helps customers to handle increased workloads and meet the fluctuating demands in the peak season.
For an e-commerce business, speed plays an important role to make the customers stay glued. A study by Akamai found out that 40% of customers abandon a web page if it takes more than three seconds to load. Even Amazon experienced an increase of 1% in revenue for every 100 milliseconds improvement to their site speed. While a sudden spike in traffic can slow down a website and make it unresponsive, cloud computing provides you with greater bandwidth, computational power, and storage.
The facility of paying per use enables to consume the services according to your requirement. As the business grows you don’t need to invest in hardware or software infrastructure. With cloud computing, the costs of developing and maintaining IT infrastructure cuts down. In 2016, Snapdeal launched its own private cloud Cirrus, which the firm believes will bring down the costs and improve performance. Cirrus, which is built on open source will help the e-commerce company visualize big data and give a personalized experience to its customers by understanding the behavior of the customers.
Cloud-based architectures are disaster tolerant. A cloud-based platform with built-in redundancy can save the business from data loss. It keeps the data secure, backed-up and easily accessible. An e-commerce business depends hugely on the data of its customers. At the time of catastrophic data losses or security threats, redundancy (or the built-in duplication of systems, data, equipment, and other components) helps to overcome the disaster and resume the business in a streamlined way.
It is predicted that global market for cloud equipment will reach $79.1 billion by 2018. Cloud services are making it possible for the e-commerce companies to reach its goals and provide a customized experience to the customers. The companies which have embraced cloud have a competitive advantage over the ones who have not adopted it yet. The agility and innovation which it has brought have lead to an increase in revenue. According to Gartner, a Corporate “No-cloud” policy will be as rare as “no-internet” policy today. Hence there is no doubt that this disruptive technology which is changing the market from last decade will keep on changing it.
We at NewGenApps excel in providing cloud-based e-commerce solutions and many other avant-garde technologies like Predictive Analytics, IoT, Artificial Intelligence, Big Data, etc which can help your business grow. To bring flexibility, scalability, and reliability in your business, get in touch!