Cloud computing for l'e-commerce is a tool suitable to ensure performances and protection via disaster recovery mainly cutting down IT costs.
High days and holidays are a great windfall for the electronic industry as a recent PayPal report sustains:46% of the Italian population are going to select internet for their Christmas shopping. That online shopping has been chosen more and more often is a given fact and for companies starting off their own e-business has become a must.
Competition is subject to ongoing growth and every day new competitors enter the marketplace. Prices have to be kept to avoid failure, sites cannot allow interruptions and tools and marketing strategies such as the SEO have to be efficient and refined. In order to deal with many types of problems in managing their own activities online, companies can now find techno-financial solutions in Cloud to simplify, enhance and make their own online activities more secure. Cloud computing offers outsourcing IT resources and infrastructures so as not to burden maintenance costs for local traditional IT company structures in companies.
For e-commerce undertakings, outsourcing offered by Cloud is a great advantage and has resulted to be fundamental for the correct functioning of websites. Here are the five reasons why using cloud computing for e-commerce is a matter that cannot be ignored:
1. Cutting Costs in order to be competitive
This is the factor that surely boosts and motivates companies more in deciding to pass onto Cloud. Using computing implies cutting hardware costs and exploiting virtualization techniques as well as eliminating the need for configuring infrastructures and managing them. Lastly, marketing strategies can be freely concentrated on rather than worry about IT. Furthermore the Pay as you go method, being the only type of payment based on consumption, used by a large number of providers in cloud, enables targeting the resources involved thus considerably cutting expenses.
2. Online velocity means customers remain more loyal
Exploiting space in cloud further means that loads are subdivided and obviating cluttering servers. Thanks to storage and backup facilities, it is possible to avoid burdening infrastructures so that websites always keep on performing and at a rapid pace. Speed and performance are essential for e-commerce. In fact, often the site is slowed down because the catalogues are too full and there is too much traffic especially during the festivities. Overloaded servers penalize performance on online sites causing the risk of offering customers a low-quality user-experience resulting in the losing more and more clients.
3. Vacillating traffic? Cloud is the remedy
Cloud grows with online shopping. As far as e-commerce enterprises are concerned the fact that traffic on sites varies is a highly critical factor. Firms in fact often are victims of high and low traffic peaks (Black Friday, sales promotions, etc.). As Cloud is flexible it offers solutions as it is able to scale the services offered based on requirements, consequently augmenting and diminishing the contribution of resources, making sure that sites are always performant by cutting the costs involved in the infrastructural investment.
4. The shop is open all over the world
Do not only take into account your own country but go further opening towards a world-wide public. Thanks to Cloud it is possible to compete at a global level. For example, it is strategically possible to choose data centres existing in areas close to customers who wish to acquire their purchases online in an affordable manner via an easy to use and rapid site.
5. Security and accessibility at a higher level
Emprises that cannot afford to halt their sales or stop their activities, the saying "the show must go on" is meritorious for the e-commerce sector. Often however enterprises that are not provided with adequate tools, find themselves faced with ransomware attacks, dealing with internal problems or having to address natural disasters. Because of this, 2017 has been a disastrous year. There have been various interruptions causing serious damage and the e-commerce sector has not been immune. The Lululemon case was amusing. This enterprise who was selling clothing to be used for yoga, with its site already in crash, attempted to hold on to its image with messages such as "Our site is in Savasana". Unfortunately
however the high cost of the interruptions were not funny for its owners.Thousands of dollars were lost in sales.
Choosing a Provider ensuring high performance at excellent costs
Cloud providers have to guarantee security in terms of privacy as well. They have to be reliable and offer affordable, scalable services and a robust infrastructure.
Amazon Web Services (AWS), a leader in the IaaS sector, supplies hosting solutions for e-commerce based on Cloud. They ensure best performances for the 5 points mentioned: cost cutting,online site velocity, traffic management, global service, security and accessibility at a higher level. Amazon tariffs are calculated on the basis of the resources used, without advance payment or long term contractual committals. Furthermore, thanks to aCloud financial management payment is facilitated and secure as well as invoicing being Italian.
High and low traffic peaks will no longer be a problem thanks to the availability of hosting provided in 16 geographical regions all over the world aimed at serving each area via a few clicks. Furthermore, via the Amazon cloudFront service - Content Delivery Network - contents are automatically routed to the nearest zone towards the user requesting them thus permitting a highest site performance in terms of speed. AWS provides tools and solutions that are highly performant to meet all the different requirements. It is possible to select various platforms and the provider further supplies SDK for the most widespread platforms such as Java, Ruby, PHP, Node.js, .NET and many others. Nothing is left to chance. Business continuity, enterprise continuity and resilience. These are guaranteed by the DisasterRecovery in cloud AWS solution that enables clearing IT infrastructures in downtimes. Regarding safety, companies have obtained a large number of SOC 1,2, and 3, PCI DSS level 1, ISO 27001, FIPS 140-2 certifications and in accordance to the General Rules for data protection (GDPR).
