Online retailers are rolling up their sleeves in preparation for the holiday season that is practically upon us. According to a report by IBM online sales have increased by 21.5%, of which 57.2% are mobile shoppers. Global online sales in this period are projected to touch 8.8% of the total retail spending in 2018, a considerable sum when you consider that the industry is geared to haul in $2 trillion in 2017.

That being said, online retailers have their work cut out for them to avoid becoming that bad headline during the blockbuster season. In the past, we have been witness to many such incidents where established retailers buckled under the pressure of high traffic during Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales. In 2016 we saw the Macy’s website succumb to the holiday e-traffic on the second biggest online shopping day of the year, Black Friday. The year before it was Target and Neiman Marcus, and Best Buy in 2014. Clearly, performance is of strategic importance for eTailers as almost 67% of Millennials and 6% of Gen Xers prefer online shopping to in-store shopping. As time and performance become the ultimate currency, here’s a look at why the Cloud is all set to rule the eCommerce shopping season to help the eTailers pass this stress test.

1. Speed and Performance:
   The cloud is built for speed and performance and the consumers of today look for just these qualities in an online store. Consumers are looking to access the products, assess and compare them and to proceed to complete the check-out in the shortest possible timeframe. Any lags here, whether it is to load pages or to complete the transaction is only going to lead to cart abandonment. The cloud servers and platforms are designed to give eCommerce sites the advantage of speed with optimal performance.
2. Scalability:
   An eCommerce store has to be ready to handle seasonal spikes in heavy traffic, especially during the special sale days. The cloud gives an eCommerce store the capability to increase their capacity, in terms of the bandwidth, storage, CPU etc. on-demand, when the eTailers need it. This gives eStores the capability to scale up to cope with the increase in traffic and scale back down when the holiday rush is over. Cloud servers bring operational agility to eCommerce stores and allow them to deal with high traffic much faster than in-house applications or servers.
3. Security:
   Delivering a secure shopping experience is of paramount importance for eTailers. A number of high-profile data breaches and vulnerabilities have impacted consumer confidence. This means that eCommerce vendors have to ensure that they take all the necessary steps to deliver a secure shopping experience to their consumers. Leveraging cloud managed services, eTailers can easily manage vulnerabilities as the software gets updated automatically regularly. This immediately eradicates vulnerabilities from legacy applications.Additionally, now cloud platforms have their own vulnerability scanning and intrusion detection, and prevention measures which increase the security of the eCommerce platform. The cloud also helps in data protection since all the data is stored securely on the cloud servers. Most cloud providers go for ISO 27001 certifications and various types of security audits to make their solutions more secure for their customers. This allows security layers to be implemented at application, facility, and network levels, thus ensuring complete data protection.
4. Disaster Recovery:
   The cloud gives eCommerce stores great disaster recovery capabilities. If an eCommerce website is hacked or if the server develops a fault, the consequences would be enormous especially during the holiday season. However, with the backup and recovery solutions provided by cloud server, eTailers can rest easy. The disaster recovery solutions are easy to implement, cost-effective and use the expertise of the cloud hosting company, making the cloud even more attractive for eCommerce.
5. Greater control and reduced burden:
   One of the greatest advantages that eCommerce stores get with the cloud is that of greater business control. They can reduce the hardware burden, the time and money spent on making software upgrades and their dependence on IT. The cloud gives retailers the flexibility to seamlessly integrate with third-party solutions (ERP, CRM etc.) that often go hand in hand with robust API-driven integration. Product upgrades and changes to the eCommerce sites can be done easily across devices. This helps eTailers improve conversion rates. By leveraging Cloud testing, eTailers can determine how their site will respond under a load based on a set of defined parameters, and from a variety of virtual device types, including smartphones, tablets, and desktops. Along with this the cloud also helps eCommerce sites respond to issues and bugs faster and also provide a connected digital experience across all devices and channels.

Along with getting their marketing plans ready for the holiday season, eCommerce sites have to make sure that this time around they are ready to face the holiday rush. In the growing eCommerce landscape, hope is not a strategy. So, instead of hoping for a good holiday run, prepare for one by leveraging a robust cloud solution to ensure great site performance. Do this to set the cash registers ringing this holiday shopping season!

Today organizations across the globe are leveraging the cloud to boost innovation and productivity within the enterprise and consequently improve their profitability as well. Gartner called the cloud one of the top technology trends back in 2015 and now expects cloud adoption to be worth USD $250 billion this year. Use-cases are also constantly evolving. While the cloud has for long been used to host business applications, given that issues such as security have been mitigated, product development is the cloud is now becoming the new normal.

IT-driven organizations now need the flexibility to work flexibly with a diverse array of technologies that are easily customizable and allow for easier integration. This need for speed and modularity has propelled the rise of SaaS or cloud products that have shaken up traditional development approaches. The traditional, monolithic style of product development has been forced to undergo a radical overhaul. Organizations today need to be more agile and responsive. They must ensure that they reduce their time to market and release features faster while creating new foundations that allow integrations and continuous deployments. In this blog, we look at how the cloud has given product development, and launch a new age facelift.

More value and Less pain:
With the cloud, product development organizations today can save themselves the pain of managing and maintaining complicated and time-consuming tools and technologies. Cloud products generally employ a common hardware infrastructure, are served from a common software instance and, often, use a common code base. This has made product development more cost-effective, manageable, and maintainable.

Speed of Development:
The traditional software development cycle has been thought of as long and time-consuming. Here the product must go back and forth amongst development, QA, and deployment or operations teams before it is finally ready for release. Clearly, such long development cycles have no place in today’s business environment that demands work to be done at light speed. Businesses should make sure that they release upgrades and patch fixes faster so that they can remain relevant in today’s competitive market place. Software development cycles have become crunched, teams have become cross-functional, release cycles have become shorter, and MVP-like iterative development has become the norm. The cloud makes the software development cycle more efficient as developers can just focus on building, testing and deploying the application and do not have to worry about the infrastructure demands.

Collaboration:
Cloud product development gives software engineers the benefit of real-time collaboration which ultimately helps in developing a superior product. Unlike traditional software development teams, software development in the cloud does not take a siloed approach and provides developers the capability to collaborate real-time in a distributed environment without worrying about customizing or upgrading existing tools or installing new tools.

The Importance of Testing:
While traditional software development used testing at the end of the development cycle, cloud product development places testing at the core of development. This change in the development methodology helps in building a product incrementally, in lesser time and with fewer defects. Since a cloud product is used by multiple users, testing application performance in conjunction with the shared resources becomes central to ascertaining application performance. In addition, testing for SLA adherence, interface backward compatibility, multi-privilege tests etc. become essential. Development and testing are brought much closer together.

The Changed Launch:
Product launches too have changed considerably in the age of the cloud. Testing product concepts has become much easier for one as information generated from connected systems can be accessed from anywhere and anytime.

Product launches have also become more fast-tracked. Platforms, frameworks, and backend services are all offered as a service under the cloud umbrella and hence developers do not need to spend time focusing on getting these in place before they get working. The cloud has also helped address the problem of capacity planning for organizations and development teams. Applications can scale easily so developers can make updates and releases without worrying about additional infrastructure investments or setting up additional computing resources. Load balancing has become easier with the cloud and has taken outage worries away with the help of load balancers and content delivery networks.

It can be said that with the cloud, product launches have become faster and easier as some of the major pain points that plagued development teams in the past have been removed.

Today organizations have turned to the cloud to optimize their development process, lower their application maintenance and operations costs, and to improve their cost efficiency. In the process, software product development and launch too have got a much-needed facelift.

Today, it’s fair to say that almost all organizations have either moved or are planning a move to the cloud owing to the operational flexibility it offers. Statistics prove as much – consider these as a sample. According to the “2016 State of the Cloud Report” by RightScale, in 2016, the Private Cloud adoption rate stands at 77%, up from 63% in 2015. Hybrid cloud adoption rates increased to 71% in 2016 from 58% year on year, and Enterprise Cloud adoption increased to 31% from 13% in 2015. Gartner estimates that the global public cloud market is expected to grow approximately 18% in 2017 to a tick over to USD$246.8 billion. Further, almost 74% of tech CFO’s credit cloud computing for delivering the most measurable impact on their business this year. Given the wide scale adoption, over the years we have witnessed three main cloud models appear – private, public and hybrid clouds. However, the question remains, which one is the most suitable for your enterprise? In this blog, we take a look at these three models and assess when to use which one.

The Public Cloud

In the Public Cloud space, Windows Azure, Amazon Cloud Services and Rackspace are big players. Amazon elastic compute cloud (EC2) for example, provides the infrastructure and services over the public internet and are hosted at the cloud vendor’s premises. The general public, SMEs or large enterprise groups can leverage this cloud model. Here the infrastructure is owned by the company that provides the cloud services. In a public cloud, the infrastructure and services are provisioned from a remote location hosted at the cloud provider’s datacenter and the customer has no control and limited visibility over where the service is hosted. But they can use those services anytime anywhere as needed. In the Public Cloud, the core computing infrastructure is shared among several organizations. That said, each organization’s data, applications, and infrastructure are separated and can only be accessed by the authorized personnel.

The Public Cloud offers advantages such as low cost of ownership, automated deployments, scalability and also reliability. The Public Cloud is well suited for the following:

• Data storage
• Data Archival
• Application Hosting
• Latency intolerant or mission critical web tiers
• On demand hosting for microsite and application.
• Auto-scaling environment for large applications.

The Private Cloud

A Private Cloud, as the name suggests, is a cloud infrastructure that is meant for use exclusively by a single organization. The cloud is then owned, managed and operated exclusively by the organization or by a third-party vendor or both together. In this cloud model, the infrastructure is provisioned on the organization premise but may be hosted in a third-party data center. However, in most cases a Private Cloud infrastructure is implemented and hosted in an on-premise data center using a virtualization layer. Private cloud environments offer greater configurability support to any application and even support those legacy applications that suffer from performance issues in Public Clouds.

While the Private Cloud offers the greatest level of control and security, it does demand that the organization purchase and maintain all the infrastructure and acquire and retain the skill to do so. This makes the Private Cloud significantly more expensive and a not-so-viable option for small or mid-sized organizations.

Choosing a Private Cloud makes sense for:

• Organization that demand strict security, latency, regulatory and data privacy levels.
• Organizations that are highly regulated and need data hosted privately and securely.
• Organizations that are large enough to support the costs that go into running a next-gen cloud data center.
• Organizations that need high-performance access to a filesystem such as in media companies.
• Hosting applications that have predictable usage patterns and demand low storage costs.
• Organizations that demand greater adaptability, configurability, and flexibility.
• Hosting business critical data and applications.

The Hybrid Cloud

So, what does an organization do when it wants to leverage the cloud both for its efficiency and cost saving but also wants security, privacy, and control? It looks at the Hybrid Cloud which almost serves as a mid-way point between Public and Private Cloud. The Hybrid Cloud uses a combination of at least one Private and one Public Cloud. The Private Cloud can be on-premise or even a virtual private cloud located outside the organization’s data center. A Hybrid Cloud can also consist of multiple Private and Public Clouds and may use many active servers, physical or virtualized, which are not a part of the Private Cloud. With the Hybrid Cloud, organizations can keep each business aspect in the most efficient cloud format possible. However, with the Hybrid Cloud, organizations have to manage multiple security platforms and aspects and also ensure that all the cloud properties can communicate seamlessly with one another.

A Hybrid Cloud is best suited for:

• Large organizations that want the flexibility and scalability as offered by the public cloud.
• Organizations that offer services for vertical markets- customer interactions can be hosted in the Public Cloud while company data can be hosted in the Private Cloud.
• Organizations that demand greater operational flexibility and scalability. For them, mission critical data can be hosted on the Private Cloud and application development and testing can take place in the Public Cloud.

Given today’s’ dynamic and increasingly complex business environment, organizations have to constantly reevaluate their cloud infrastructure, whether Public, Private or Hybrid, to ensure that the cloud delivers on its promise. Since there are different security and management demands for each of these cloud models, organizations have to ensure that they select their application candidates for the cloud wisely so that they can foster innovation and improve agility by leveraging their IT resources optimally. What would your choice be?

Cloud computing is a new way of doing business. A lot of companies, both big and small, are considering moving to the cloud to make their business more organized and efficient. This allows them to stop worrying about IT infrastructure and concentrate on other aspects that will help in business expansion in the future. But there are some factors that are absolutely important when you are considering this migration. The move will directly or indirectly affect your security and privacy issues, risk management practices, compliance, auditing and many other such issues. Here are four of the most important aspects you need to take into consideration to ensure that the move takes place smoothly:

1. Reliability and Security:
   Shifting to the cloud is going to be a big change for the systems, data management and overall functionality of your organization. While the model for how IT services are delivered and consumed may be in for a change, the end objectives will be the same, hence it is very important that the new solutions support all the elements that are vital for the end users. Even small glitches in the cloud implementation could lead to major problems in the functioning. Your cloud may be a test bed for new services and applications, developers are working on or it may be running your payroll. No matter what the purpose of the cloud is, users expect it to function perfectly every minute of the day. Hence, it is important that you choose a cloud service that is completely available, reliable and secure. Ensure that it has the capability to continue to operate and keep the data intact in the virtual datacenter even if a failure occurs in some component. Additionally, if the cloud architecture is dealing with a shared resource pool, security and multi-tenancy need to be integrated into all aspects of the process. Services must be seen to be secure and reliable to gain the trust of the users that their data and applications are secure.
2. Selecting the right provider:
   Know what your exact cloud computing needs are so that you can dictate the type of services you choose from your specific provider. Aspects such as available data storage, pricing structure and accessibility need to be clearly defined before taking the first steps. For basic storage, software-based cloud offerings such as Dropbox may work best. If you are looking for more than basic data storage, with an IT infrastructure and on-demand access to virtual servers, vendors such as IBM, SmartCloud Enterprise, GoGrid and Amazon Web Services would be best. If you want access to specific business solutions you should be turning to the Saleforce and other SaaS providers of the world. In terms of pricing, do thorough research before making a decision and make sure that you are only paying for what you use. Ideally, the pricing scheme should come with options to add services as needed. Pricing for cloud implementation services varies significantly, from as low as $1 per month to $100 a month.
3. Business advantages:
   You are taking the big step of cloud implementation but what you want to focus on is how the move will affect your business and help expand it. In this case, you need to listen to what your service provider is promising you. Make sure that your provider is not focused only on technology outcomes. It may deliver excellent technology but may not be relevant to your business. Opt for a provider whose solutions can help you with high customer retention or streamlined product delivery. For this, choosing a service provider with your specific vertical market as a focus could help. To gain maximum benefits from cloud implementation, try to communicate your business objectives clearly to your provider. Thus they can be more involved in the process of business expansion and give their inputs during their time of decision-making.
4. Regulatory compliance:
   The Cloud move can involve the transmission of data across uncontrolled internet connections that are susceptible to interception and monitoring. Most cloud-based services are secure and use different forms of encryption either via web-based communications (eg. SSL or TLS over HTTPS) or through secure applications. However, the effectiveness of the encryption may depend on a number of factors and the actual algorithms may fall short of the Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) encryption requirements. At the same time, cloud services that make use of proprietary transmission software may require validation in order to meet the Government standards. Hence it is very important that the cloud provider you choose has all the provisions to maintain regulatory compliance so that it meets any applicable industry regulations, allowing your business to grow smoothly and flourish.

Conclusion:
Cloud computing is a big move. Data centers are now delivering highly reliable and highly scalable services to clients, but it is up to those enterprises making the move to pick the right service provider and the right set of features their business demands. Look at the factors of value to your business and make your choice – and if you have already made the move then help the rest of us out – let us know how you went about making your choice?

An increasing number of enterprises today are migrating to the Cloud. A survey conducted by RightScale, a cloud automation vendor, confirmed this trend and revealed that:

• 93% of respondents reported that they are adopting the cloud.
• 88% of the respondents reported using the public cloud.
• 63% of the respondents use the private cloud.
• 58% of respondents use both private and public cloud.

Migrating to the cloud presents enterprises with some obvious benefits. Increased availability, better performance and clear cost benefits are some of the obvious advantages of moving to the cloud. Research conducted by various agencies such as Gartner, Ovum, Forrester, International Data Corporation (IDC) and others agree – “the global SaaS market is projected to grow from $49B in 2015 to $67B in 2018, attaining a CAGR of 8.14%.” and by 2019 cloud applications will account for worldwide mobile traffic. Goldman Sachs also estimates that the “cloud infrastructure and platform market will grow at a 19.62% CAGR from 2015 to 2018, reaching $43B by 2018”

However, when migrating to the cloud enterprises have to ensure that their initial footprint in the cloud is compatible with the technology stack present in the cloud platform of their choice. They also have to ensure that the platform is able to scale comfortably to suit growing business and user requirements. Thus taking a strategic approach becomes an essential part of cloud migration and consider how the enterprise intends to do business so that this can become an inherent part of the cloud strategy.

Cloud migration is the process in which data, applications or other business elements are moved from onsite computers to a cloud infrastructure or are moved from one cloud infrastructure to another. In this post, we will shine the light on some essential components of a cloud migration checklist. We hope this will help enterprises looking to migrate to the cloud do so seamlessly and help them reap the real benefits of this move.

Network architecture:
To take complete advantage of the cloud, enterprises need to make sure that their network infrastructures are set up for this. Traditional network infrastructures may suffer poor application performance or even expose themselves to security vulnerabilities. Thus before making the move to the cloud enterprises need to make sure that their network is well-designed and cloud-optimized by ensuring routing optimization, reliability, and low latency in WAN performance, and ensuring device support. Taking a holistic approach to the network architecture thus, becomes the foundation of successful cloud migration.

Application architecture:
While moving applications to the cloud might look simple, in reality, this takes a lot of careful planning for great execution. Before migrating applications to the cloud, architects need to evaluate if legacy applications need to be replaced and assess which applications will get the most out of the cloud investment by doing an inventory assessment and then plan the application move. Typically, enterprises should avoid moving systems in large chunks and should ensure that these systems or application first-movers are not the most business critical and tricky. Mission-critical workloads, legacy application, sensitive data might not be the best first movers to a public cloud. Treating the cloud as a logical extension of the current landscape and assessing application dependency thus becomes an essential part of the cloud migration check-list.

Business continuity plan:
Having a business continuity plan should also form an essential plan of the cloud migration journey as vulnerabilities, natural or man-made (think the Japan earthquake or the Amazon outage in 2011) can sometimes disrupt business. Enterprises need to build diversity into the disaster recovery and business continuity systems and should be able to run on a number of different infrastructures. Evaluating options for business continuity and designing systems and configurations that can enable a high level of automation should find a significant spot on a cloud migration check-list.

Evaluating costs:
So, should you opt for a private cloud, public cloud or hybrid cloud? While cost efficiency is a big reason of why enterprises move to the cloud, it is important to remember that financial benefits differ from one application to another. Applications using legacy hardware can be more expensive to run in the cloud. Identifying the technical requirements, gathering performance data, and identifying if there shall be any hidden expenses when migrating to the cloud can help in planning the network and bandwidth costs and for deciding which cloud flavor will best suit the enterprise.

Governance and security:
Since traditional on-premise systems will not work as-is in the cloud, enterprises have to take a look at evaluating their governance approaches. As most of the governance responsibility rests on the cloud providers once the move to the cloud is complete, enterprises need to reshape their governance strategies to rely more on the offerings by the cloud than on their internal security. Assessing the cloud providers’ security certifications thus becomes important. Planning ahead for any fail overs, potential breaches and disaster recovery also becomes a critical part of a cloud migration check-list.

Conclusion:
As enterprises assess the benefits and risks of a move to the cloud, it is important to note that cloud migration does not have to be an ‘all or nothing’ proposition. With careful assessment, enterprises can begin with first moving some applications and services to the cloud and continue to operate the rest on-premise. Once all the boxes in this check-list have been crossed then enterprises can avail rapid cloud transformation and embrace the power offered by the cloud.