The focus of consumption of many products and services has shifted toward online shopping and home delivery. In search of infrastructure that will survive Black Friday and tools to launch online services, companies have come to the cloud.
We’re talking about technologies that can help you become more efficient and cost-effective. According to Alpacked.io, businesses today are actively moving their workflows to the cloud. Thanks to cloud technologies, business has the ability to scale quickly.
So, let’s look at how the cloud impacts the digital side of business.
Retail
The explosive development of online commerce has led to a redefinition of the requirements for online store locations. You need a flexible infrastructure: the ability to ramp up resources during seasonal peaks and then adapt to medium or low demand. In the case of running your own servers, this means alternately idle or lack of capacity. An online store built in the cloud can quickly adjust to the load.
In addition, high competition in the market forces retailers to constantly take care of customer loyalty: improving mobile applications and ensuring flawless site operation, supporting chatbots to collect feedback, creating personalized loyalty programs, and conducting business analytics.
Big Data for retail is a powerful and useful tool. However, to start using it, you need experts who can build a data factory: raise, configure, and automate the systems necessary to do so. Over the past year, demand for computing resources and ready-made platform solutions (PaaS-services) to work with Big Data from retailers has grown significantly.
Logistics
Several stakeholders interact in the process of organizing the delivery of goods. They are customers, carriers, warehouses, freight forwarders, and transport companies. The process consists of many stages, which are important to automate and bring together in a single loop. For example, on the cargo transportation exchange. It will allow you to hold an auction among several transport companies and track the movement of cargo.
Building such an ecosystem requires reliable data redundancy, automated maintenance, and rapidly scalable computing power. Logistics companies have turned to cloud providers for such tasks. For them, it is an opportunity to create a single service without a deep dive into non-core business IT infrastructure management and the expansion of IT staff.
Carriers create transport monitoring systems to control their condition, the work of drivers, and the conditions of cargo delivery. To do this, they use sensors that collect the right information – from driving speed to the temperature in the refrigerator. They transmit the data to the system, which collects and analyzes it. The platform for data processing and visualization can be developed independently from scratch. Or components can be obtained to create such a system in the cloud.
Healthcare
Information systems that could collect and organize data about patients, prescribed treatment, conducted researches, and methodical recommendations from various sources are essential for medical institutions today. This information is needed to help make informed decisions.
At the same time, healthcare is a rather conservative field. It involves many interacting parties throughout the country. These are clinics, insurance companies, regulatory bodies, patients. It is also important for them to ensure that medical data is protected at the right level. In the cloud, you can not just collect and store data (including personal data), but also develop systems to classify and analyze it.
Cloud technology allows launching a pilot project using AI technologies in a short period. Such digital services help the doctor make the right diagnosis based on patient responses, test results, or recognition of various images. Commercial organizations are adopting systems that automate customer services, such as chatbots or computer vision.
Cloud resources make it possible to scale the solution to an extensive network of clinics. There is no need to install software separately at each facility when it is available from the cloud.
Education
In 2020, most universities and schools temporarily switched to distance learning. Educational institutions were forced to rebuild their IT infrastructure to meet online requirements. The organization of education has become much like the business of video hosting: recording, downloading, and broadcasting lectures, organizing streams and video conferences, creating a virtual educational space. This requires fault-tolerant and scalable infrastructure, which is easier to get in the cloud.
The emergence of large interactive platforms uniting millions of users inside and outside the country has become an obvious trend. Educational projects and startups are creating their applications, which also need a flexible development and testing environment.
Cloud Gaming
Cloud gaming services make it possible to run games with high system requirements on low-performance computers and even on smartphones, thanks to the fact that computing has moved from user devices to the cloud.
Gaming services take advantage of the different capabilities of cloud platforms. For example, to distribute game content without latency (both static and dynamic) or to take customer experience to the next level by automatically searching for errors while centrally processing and storing logs. PaaS solutions help develop and update mobile applications in the face of unpredictable demand.
Summing Up
For companies in retail, logistics, education, healthcare, and cloud gaming, digitalization has become a key business challenge. This process could have been unfeasible for them. Serious technical competencies within companies and significant time and financial expenditures on IT are required.
But thanks to the service model of obtaining infrastructure and ready-made platforms for creating digital systems, every business can focus on creating new services rather than on the routine maintenance of the necessary IT infrastructure.
