Public cloud adoption is rife in the retail sector, with 94 percent of Line of Business (LOBs) decision makers using some form of public cloud services, a new study from EMC, VCE and VMware reveals. Against this backdrop, of the 604 LOBs in the UK that responded from the retail sector, the majority of these deployments are done in collaboration with IT: over half (52 percent) run all purchasing decisions past the IT team. Cloud computing has gained significant momentum across retail sector organisations and the research highlights how LOBs are taking advantage of the benefits that cloud services facilitates. Almost half (44 percent) use public cloud services for internal applications to drive efficiencies ranging from collaboration tools to hosting intranets for knowledge sharing), closely followed by website hosting (42 percent) and hosting external applications such as customer invoicing or sales-enablement platforms (41 percent).
Yet despite the levels of awareness of what public cloud services can bring to the business, concerns over security and data management persist. The top perceived risks by LOBs with using public cloud services included security exploits (47 percent), customer data loss (42 percent), and internal data loss (34 percent), while just 5percent stated they have no concerns over using public cloud services.
“It’s clear the industry is united in its use of public cloud services, and understandably so – it can offer access to vast amounts of IT resource LOBs may feel they need in order to compete with the growing number of disruptions the industry faces, whether that’s from pure online retailers or customer demand for a seamless experience,” comments Rob Lamb, Cloud Business Director, UK and Ireland, EMC. “For IT to continue to work collaboratively with the business, it needs to embrace a cloud strategy that allows employees to gain immediate and easy access to secure resources while providing the portability of workloads in a flexible, agile fashion.”
“To truly realise the full benefits cloud computing can offer, the IT department must offer the business easy access to cloud services, but in a controlled, compliant manner,” comments Nigel Moulton, Chief Technology Officer, VCE. “It’s here where a hybrid cloud strategy can fit seamlessly, allowing IT and businesses to embrace the public cloud with confidence, in a secure and manageable way.”
