The Need For Speed: Leveraging Cloud-based Platforms For Retail Innovation

The Need for Speed: Leveraging Cloud-based Platforms for Retail Innovation

A Q&A with Victoria Livschitz, Founder and CTO of Grid Dynamics, and Ferhat Hatay, Senior Manager of Strategy and Innovation at Fujitsu

How has cloud computing evolved in the past 5-10 years?

Over the last decade, the cloud has evolved from a promising and trendy technology into the mainstream. Retailers are overwhelmed with more of everything - data, services, integration points, channels, geographies, and they need capacity to host, manage and run it all. That is not the whole story though. Retailers also need to go faster and faster in their innovation cycle. In the past, it was generally accepted that all big changes to the commerce site were done once a year, before the holidays. Contrast that today with Amazon rolling out new services every day. In fact, Amazon deploys new features and services into production either internally or externally every six seconds. They have been out-innovating everyone, and retailers are getting the message. To compete and survive, they must innovate. Now, it is widely accepted within retailer IT divisions that projects must be delivered in an agile way, and new services must be launched within a few weeks from inception. This kind of speed in time-to-market and experimentation flat out requires the cloud.

Retailers are very aware that building and maintaining the trust of their customers is of utmost importance, and after all it makes perfect business sense. In the early days of public cloud introduction there were security concerns slowing down the adoption, especially in light of the data breaches that had occurred.  But things have since dramatically changed at every level of access from user access, to data encryption, to firewalls, to backend security. Security in the Cloud has become not only significantly better than before, but according to some accounts, even stronger than what can be delivered in most private data centers.