The e-commerce industry is growing in leaps and bounds, and, therefore, having an e-commerce site for your business is essential. Not only having an e-commerce website is vital but also employing modern technology is necessary to stay ahead. Now a days everybody is talking about Cloud Computing.
Unfortunately, we live in times, wherein utilization of resources is phenomenal and availability of the same resources is minimal. In order to handle this battle, the enterprises have given birth to cloud computing.
Many studies have concluded that if cloud based e-commerce application model is used, then it will let help online entrepreneurs to cope with the shortage of resources in a better way.
Impact of Cloud Computing on an E-commerce business
Saves you money
Cloud computing works on a pay-as-you-go basis, which means you will have to pay for only those services that you use in a particular month. As an e-commerce business, you will face many costs pertaining to infrastructure, software updates and maintenance. However, it is cheaper and easier to use cloud provider’s storage and services than employing in-house facilities.
Customizable and quicker services You sure don’t want to lose out on sales due to poor resource availability. Therefore, cloud computing can help your e-commerce site to cope with increased traffic on your web store. Using cloud provider’s services, you are ensured to facilitate more number of sales as your site is not restricted to just one server.
If you aim to grow your revenue by launching your e-commerce site in a different country then you need to customize your site depending on cultural requirements. In order to simply focus on the features such as loyalty programs, you can effectively outsource the daily technical functioning to a cloud offering software-as-a-service (SaaS) e-commerce platform.
Data Security
The biggest concern for an e-commerce website is the security of the data. Many websites have reported their database to be stolen. In the case of cloud computing, data is stored in the cloud, which reduces the probability of data leakage. Moreover, data monitoring will be done by managers of the data centers to ensure safety of your data.
There are three types of cloud based e-commerce application model: 1. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) 2. Platform as a Service (PaaS)
3. Software as a Service (Saas)
The most common deployment models of cloud computing are public cloud infrastructure and private cloud infrastructure. There are many offerings in the market for building cloud infrastructures but you need to know varied product configuration management tools before you decide on any.
Some of the open source product configuration management tools are as follows
• Ansible
Ansible is the best product configuration management tool for securing all the data of your e-commerce site. Ansible is built on five design principles viz. ease of use, low learning curve, complete automation, security and efficiency.
• CFEngine
CFEngine is the most customizable product configuration management tool. It lets you create and destroy cloud resources specifically and dynamically. CFEngine’s low footprint makes it perfect for large-scale operation.
• Chef Opscode created Chef as an open-source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation framework. One can manage servers in-house and also in the cloud. Chef is available in three versions: a) Private Chef b) Hosted Chef
c) Open Source Chef
E-commerce is certainly not lagging behind in terms of technology advancement. The usage of cloud computing is getting all the attention from small to large e-commerce enterprises.
Although cloud computing is still considered to be in a nascent stage and is believed to make more improvements, it is still desirable and profitable to many enterprises- big and small. Cloud computing is known to serve predominant needs of all businesses online.