What questions would retailers like X5 Retail Group, Open, Auchan and others ask when moving to Cloud4Y?
These are challenging times for retailers. Buyers' habits and their desires have changed over the past decade. Online competitors are about to begin to step on your tail.
Gen Z shoppers want a simple and functional profile to receive personalized offers from stores and brands. They use different devices and access points and are often no longer eager to communicate with staff, as grandmothers were when visiting the good old markets.
In order to somehow adapt to the time, retailers need to lift their heads from the old approaches and pay attention to the clouds.
By taking advantage of them, you can deliver an adequate user experience.
Retail leaders have been present on the market for centuries, experiencing recessions and changing fashions, but have not yet encountered crises like today's.
For example, in one of the civilized countries of the West, 14 stores are closed every day.
Inevitably we need to develop.
Unfortunately, many retailers are held back by dilapidated infrastructure, old legacy systems, not to mention the sysadmin, the director's friend, sitting on a large salary.
Legacy often slows down progress, but for some systems, programmers are already dying out, and new ones will be better off learning some kind of Go, rather than conditional Cobol.
On the other hand, sectors such as finance are heavily investing in IT at 7% of their income, highlighting the fundamental importance of being on the cutting edge of technology. Sparing money on such investments means losses for the retailer.
Now in sales it is important to use all the capabilities of the IT infrastructure. Amazon Go will come to Russia sooner or later. Do we want him to sweep away our dear Pyaterochkas with his good old aunt Klava at the cash register as Yandex swept away local taxi drivers?
The decision to deploy IT operations in the cloud can be complex and needs the blessing of business owners.
And it is important for them to know the answers to all their questions. So what questions should retailers ask before migrating to Cloud4Y?
The first question
How much money will we raise from this?
Nearly two-thirds of retailers say migration won't pay off. They need to look at it in more detail and in terms of long-term investment. Think about what cloud migration will add to their business and what pains it will eliminate.
In today's retail environment, the cloud offers significant cost savings. The possibility of mass scaling and the ability to throw off at least part of the capital costs of infrastructure, setting up with a mouse, not a team of loaders - all this is very cool and saves a lot of time, nerves and money at the moment.
Enterprises are seeing an increase in revenue from outsourcing storage, computing, and other services through a pay-as-you-go model to the clouds fairly quickly.
The headache with capital expenditures, expensive licenses, support for software and databases, infrastructure and SUDDEN scaling ends where the cloud service begins.
The main thing is for the CEO to evaluate the potential losses from being left behind and the benefits from getting ahead:
- The cost of data transfer is incomparable with the cost of updating a fleet of half-dead ancient servers.
- While data growth in the cloud can take a long time, in the cloud you can fine-tune exactly the space and resources you need right now, whether it's Black Friday or New Year's Eve.
- The cost of service especially changes when it comes to internal management. Using the cloud, you only pay for what you actually receive. No expenses for supplies, moving, registration and dismissal of employees. All this is included in the cost of cloud services and it is much cheaper.
The possibilities of the cloud are vast, but you need a reliable company that will tell you how to get the most out of them. Today's century is the century when efficiency is achieved through narrow specialization. Professionals behind their work are the key to general well-being.
The second question
What applications and data should we start with?
More than a fifth of retailers have already moved their data and computing to the cloud. The rest have already outlined their backlog and monetary losses. Although some old software is still difficult to move, however, the expansion of resources also leads to improved performance.
Autoscaling resources and performance in the cloud can benefit your applications, which can spread the load across multiple servers.
Cloud orchestration tools can be used to monitor and dynamically scale according to current requirements and without human involvement.
It makes sense to start migrating from applications that are originally provided for the clouds. A gradual migration strategy may be appropriate for deprecated applications, as this approach will allow you to make a minimum of changes to the code.
Just remember that there is no rush and no need to transfer everything at once and instantly. Conduct a thorough workload analysis, determine where to focus, and then use this as a roadmap to extract maximum profit from moving to the cloud.
Third question
How do we track resources?
Unlike the bearded way of storing data on a static server, the cloud is dynamic and clever. Vehicle resources and flexibility mean that anyone in your office can take on as much as they need in a moment. There are also a number of special accounts for business units with resources provided in advance.
Ease of deployment poses some organizational risks. Organization of security, restriction in access to resources, cost overruns due to redundancy of resources and changes for software compatibility.
To avoid all of this, retailers should consider operating and management models that monitor running applications and make adjustments when there is a shortage or oversupply of resources. Without such monitoring, there is a risk of wasting money on applications that will remain running for no reason. It is also better to analyze bills for used applications. This can all be automated, of course.
Resource management is vital in migration, as every unused resource eats into money and undermines real savings.
Our experts will help to resolve all such issues for the benefit of any business.
fourth question
How will we protect the environment?
Moving applications and data to the cloud does not remove the responsibility from the owners of this data. Retailers bear it in relation to the personal data of their customers.
Since the release of the CDPR in May 2018, all organizations have an additional obligation to meet a certain level of requirements. Data leaks are very critical because... it is necessary to keep them legally before the relevant law enforcement agencies. The reputational loss of a cloud provider during such episodes may threaten to close the business. This forces us to provide the highest level possible.
Cloud provider leaders provide robust physical servers protected through a layer of virtualization. With our army of engineers, supporting you and your data is a no-brainer.
No cloud provider can guarantee 100%, because this is also your responsibility as the owner of the information. However, we help you migrate and set everything up in order to achieve the maximum level of protection.
Malicious software has become more inconspicuous. Many have gained access to it and can carry out an attack. The availability of ecosystems for cyberattacks allows any schoolboy to join in the spread of viruses.
Hacking is not what it used to be.
If at the dawn only enthusiastic geeks were engaged in this, then today's bandits are well motivated financially. As a rule, they work for organized crime groups or a government like some kind of North Korea.
The business went online, taking money there. Cybercriminals, although they cannot break into data centers or your sysadmin's office, are able to gain control over an employee's account.
For example, Petya hit 2 businesses in 000 countries by blocking users of its own ecosystems.
More than 9 infected files are detected per day, and 000 virus families are constantly active. Initially, ransomware like WannaCry and Petya had no specific purpose. Cybercriminals have changed tactics and are now aiming at the weak points of their targets.
Almost all businesses use the cloud today, especially in the West. This allows shareholders to have access to company information from anywhere, even from a mobile phone on a safari in Africa. Security considerations in some cases are not as strict as in Cloud4Y, and this may lead to security risks.
To hack into the cloud network, it can be enough to gain access to an employee's email or computer by sending a fake email with a malicious link. If an employee clicks on it, consider it lost.
The Achilles' heel is smartphones and IoT. To simplify, companies give access to important information to employees from personal phones. The rise in personal devices has raised risks. Cyber ββattackers can snoop on the passwords that employees enter when they log in from smartphones or tablets. The Internet of Things is also growing with a security lag. Sometimes solutions are just unsafely written by clumsy coders.
In the future, even more cybercrimes with greater profit are expected. Cryptojacking attacks using other people's computers to plant crypto mines will require CPU power and the scalability of cloud services. But many organizations donβt care about all this.
Attacks on mobile devices will become more frequent. But they will no longer use highly targeted viruses, but harvesters. And when Skynet is filed down and it takes over organizations, hackers will attack it to gain the power of artificial intelligence. Taking control of IoT will be easier. It will become one of the weakest points to protect.
Moreover, the authorities of the European Union and Russia are rolling out new laws on personal data and their protection. This means that organizations will not be able to protect data and will be forced to make it publicly available.
Fifth question
How will we be responsible for your leadership if it screws everything up?
By dragging data into the cloud, you have your own risks. Without normal managers, you can lose everything, given that another top manager may accidentally lose his phone on which he logged in. The human factor remains on your conscience.
A prudent and appropriate administrative policy and operating model refers to the standards that are set by cloud trends. Given the dynamic nature of the cloud, the traditional management approach is too slow. We need some kind of automation, old approaches need to be updated.
It's time for retail in Russia to grow, taking advantage of available technology to compete with the odds of winning. In Innopolis they are already testing stores without cash registers and staff. Are you smart? We are talking about a variety of tools, the benefits of which you can evaluate right now on
Source: habr.com