The Cloud is Taking Over Ecommerce

INTRODUCTION

Online shopping is offering choices to consumers that they never had before, with more retailers available every day and selections from all over the world. Small businesses in particular, are able to take their operations, marketing and sales global with the help of cloud technology. Consumers and businesses are all able to browse the cheapest goods available across a range of markets (with a large number of aggregators available) on web portals powered on the cloud.

A recent MarketsandMarkets report says the cloud storage data market will be worth USD $74.94B by 2021, with North America leading the market but Asia Pacific growing the fastest. Highlighting this growth in Asia, the Financial Times recently reported that quarterly revenues at Alibaba Cloud, rose 115% year on year to USD $254M. Morgan Stanley says that the company’s annual revenue could reach USD $8.72 billion by 2020.

It’s little wonder why this has happened. Placing data on the cloud is key to opening flexibility, offering insights that are usable, and providing everything an ecommerce retailer requires to act nimbly in the competitive and global retail environment. A McKinsey report, The consumer sector in 2030: Trends and questions to consider, highlights how important the cloud will be. The report asks companies to analyze these elements: “Have we digitized both our front and back end?” “Have we adopted a ‘mobile first’ mind-set?” “Are we advancing with analytics?” Each of these considerations can be effectively run and managed on the cloud.

High performance cloud products and solutions are provided by vendors including Alibaba Cloud, and offer a slew of advantages over traditional data storage models.These advantages include lower infrastructure costs, faster time to market, ondemand scalability, predictive analysis, increased security from internal and external attacks, and streamlined maintenance.

Powered by Intel Xeon processors, Alibaba Cloud products and solution offers highperformance computing workloads and business-critical applications, advanced analytics, seasonal bursting capabilities, and improved security to protect sensitive business information. This means businesses can deliver real-time services in energy, financial trading, healthcare, logistics and other industries, with flexible configurations and reliable architecture, all while eliminating interruption. Other innovations in ecommerce, from payment to authentication, analytics, security,maintenance, and Artificial Intelligence (AI), are also powered by the cloud.