The IT landscape continues to change in the retail industry. As a result, smaller companies are looking for ways to add value to their IT departments and empower them to improve the customer experience and boost overall revenue.
In a recent webinar, titled: Leveling The Playing Field: The Benefits Of Cloud For Small To Midsize Retailers, executives from EarthLink Business discussed how cloud adoption can lead to success for SMBs.
“A lot of customers want to connect with your brand, and may not feel so strongly about another brand that can deliver the same goods and services that you do,” said Ron Penna, Senior Product Manager for the Cloud at EarthLink Business. “So there is an opportunity for SMBs to level the playing field against the giants.”
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Several issues prevent some small businesses from adapting to the cloud as quickly as larger retailers. Security issues top the list as the most significant challenges preventing SMBs from making a smooth transition.
“Features such as adding Wi-Fi access in your stores do present several challenges,” Penna said. “The customer wants to share their information with you if it will help boost their experience. But they also want to be sure that when they swipe their credit card at your terminal, it’s not going to be siphoned off to someone’s basement in an eastern European country.”
Other factors holding SMBs back include aging infrastructures that cannot run cloud-based technologies, as well as a lack of resources that prevents small businesses from staying updated without stealing resources away from areas that run the day-to-day operations.
The Cloud Saves Employees Time, Centralizes Resources
Although some of the challenges appear daunting, there are “answers out there” in order to help SMBs stay “on top of the latest things on the market,” according to Penna.
“Managed cloud hosting — and services like hosted cloud infrastructure — can make that incremental transition less painful,” Penna noted. “You can slowly stop focusing the bulk of your time on keeping the lights on in your business, and start to focus on driving the business forward through change and evolution.”
A managed cloud provider, or managed cloud services, allows employees to spend more time focused on improving customer engagement and implementing innovative ideas versus running day-to-day business operations.
Another major benefit of cloud computing is the centralization of resources and infrastructure for easier management. It provides a “consolidated management infrastructure” where issues and security threats can be maintained and controlled from a single location, according to Penna.
“It gives you the ability to free yourself from managing endpoints or terminals across all your locations and individual devices,” Penna said. “If you’re a retailer — with anywhere between one store and 10 stores — and you have any issues with the installed technology at any location, that issue can be handled in that one centralized location if you have a consolidated infrastructure.”
This centralized location also allows retailers to meet PCI compliance without having to worry about each individual store, and even offers lower costs to maintain and run the system. Backup and disaster recovery are easily managed from a single location.
With the cloud in place, the long-term goal of saving time and money — while allowing employees to help the company grow — are too promising to ignore.
Penna concluded: “Instead of fighting change, embracing it and successfully integrating it into the way you do business will let you see a huge financial impact as well as drive customer satisfaction.”
Click here to access an on-demand version of the webinar.
