The cloud is a beneficial environment for an online store

The use of clouds as the basis to create an online store is a well-known topic. Their users quickly recognise their potential and opportunities. As with any technological solution, there are skeptics but it does not stop the growth of e-commerce on the grounds of cloud computing.

According to a recent report by the K2 group, already 55 % of online stores use the computing cloud.

A goodbye to costly maintenance of local servers

Building a new or migrating an existing e-store to the cloud eliminates quite a huge and troublesome topic related to having local servers, which include, among others: purchase, replacement, or disposal of used equipment.

Those machines constantly maintain highly developed technologies, servers, and systems, which means that they are constantly working at high speed and as a natural result they are subject to wear. What is more, when it comes to equipment, or actually its lack, you also save the space at the company's building, which would have to be used when planning to adapt the local infrastructure.

For your own servers, you need a secluded, adequately cooled space, with an emergency power supply, redundant internet connections with high bandwidth, and the highest quality safety features responsible for protecting servers from unauthorized access.


 

Optimizing the work of the IT team

The PaaS (Platform as a Service) model, as one of the cloud computing services available on the market, enables the delegation of a significant part of the administrative tasks related to the functioning of the online store to the service provider. Because of that, it is not necessary to have a person or even department focused only on controlling, updating, or repairing current failures in operating systems. Relieving the IT team from administering the platform directs their potential to the development of e-commerce.

Whenever the topic of cloud computing services is discussed, there is a belief that its implementation eliminates the administrator's position. This is not a correct assumption. Despite the reduced amount of time spent on administrative work and directing the work of the IT department to other duties, an employee who has cloud computing competences is still needed.

Such a person supports the supervision of the proper functioning of the system and is needed to optimize the consumption of cloud resources, but thanks to the cloud these are not their only tasks.

Transparent SLA terms for cloud services

To provide our sales platform with a stable level of cloud service reliability, we conclude an SLA (Service Level Agreement) with the supplier. It governs the availability of servers and virtual tools functioning within the purchased service. In e-commerce, it is a significant guarantee of the activity of the cloud space used, which eliminates any downtime during its usage.

The providers of cloud solutions most often have predetermined percentage parameters of the availability indicator. The most popular ones offered in SLA are within the scope of 99% -99.9%, and the remaining 1-0.1% is the time allowed for the supplier in a given reference period for planned and unplanned downtime.

Using the SLA, it is also possible to determine specific factors influencing the possible occurrence of unplanned downtime (e.g. defects, errors, breakdowns, maintenance work). Exceeding the time of server unavailability, which has been set in the contract, obliges the supplier to compensate the Customer for the losses incurred due to this.

The most commonly used form of compensation is a discount for next settlement periods, but there are also contractual penalties and refunds. What is more, the SLA concluded with the cloud provider can precisely define the transmission channel through which communication regarding unplanned downtime is to take place.
 

Real-time scalability

The specificity of many branches of e-commerce industries is associated with periodic demand increases. There are several dates, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, or the pre-Christmas period, when consumer activity in almost the entire area of both online and offline commerce increases multiple times.

The cloud online store does not need the current storage of backup server resources to meet the temporarily higher market demand.

Because of the automatic scaling systems of the resources in the computing cloud, when the increased activity on the e-store's website is registered, the available virtual space expands proportionally to the needs of the website. That is how a scalable infrastructure copes with a rapid load on the store and meets consumer expectations.

Only the actually used cloud computing resources are settled, therefore savings are seen simultaneously in terms of budget, time, and energy devoted to the calculation of appropriate server resources. An online store in local infrastructure in order to be used with maximum efficiency in the time of increased consumer demand must be provided with protection in the form of backup server capacity.

Keeping them fully prepared for use in the time of a rapid increase in activity on the store, servicing, or replacement are costs that seem to be an unprofitable investment over time. The scalability of the cloud has many other benefits for e-commerce, such as:

• Comfortable, continuous development and improvement of the e-store (computing cloud offers a wide range of ready-made tools, implementation of which takes literally a moment)
• More convenient and efficient Time-to-market
• Increased efficiency of the online store without the need to waste resources

Protection against downtime Based on cloud services e-commerce is protected by modern, strong security systems that comprehensively secure its entire virtual space that is used as part of the purchased services.

It is difficult to provide your website with a comparable quality of protection customized to current and newer virtual threats while maintaining an on-permise online store, mainly due to extremely high costs. Even suppliers who ensure a level of almost 100 % reliability of their cloud solutions are prepared for possible unplanned downtime.

Geographic dispersion based on regions is essential to design a solid and stable cloud infrastructure. These are independent locations of the computing cloud, where the features of cloud service providers are located, often as several databases.

The distribution of regions in different locations increases the possible availability of the service at the time of a local fault. During downtime in any of the regions, the e-store resources can be directed to one of the remaining ones. What also happens is that they are dispersed to several regions from the beginning for the best availability of the service.

Actions compatible with specific legal regulations

A computing cloud is an e-commerce tool that facilitates continuous development. While expanding the area of the online store's activity, there are numerous legal regulations applicable in various parts of the world. First of all, they relate to the necessity to store personal data of customers in the appropriate geographical area of the country they live. It is sometimes associated with the creation of dedicated server locations by cloud providers to meet such legal requirements.

Another requirement for the infrastructure on which we want to base our e-commerce is to adapt the environment to certified standards in various aspects. Local server infrastructure requires time-consuming efforts to obtain such certificates and high costs if there are several requirements to be met.

Global cloud service providers like Microsoft Azure relieve e-commerce companies at the point of these problematic processes. It occurs because of the compliance with an exceptionally wide range of legal requirements that apply in various regions around the world.

So, what is the conclusion?

The expansion of the online store based on the computing cloud is undoubtedly a great support for e-commerce managers and the entire team working on the sales platform.

Reduced time-consuming and costly issues are a benefit both for the managers and for the overall operation of the company. Many topics related to availability, security, or reliability cannot be completed at the highest possible level on the cloud together with achieving satisfactory profits out of it.