The retail sector turns to the cloud to help deliver a seamless customer experience
The retail sector has suffered some serious casualties in the battle to survive the recession, with some of the victims being household names.
Yet, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) statistics offered a window of hope for the retail sector by reporting that sales in early April were higher than a year ago.
The outcome of the General Election will have a severe impact on consumer behaviour and confidence. Regardless of who is in power, households will be affected by the imminent cuts to public spending as well as higher taxes and fears of increasing unemployment. Therefore, for those companies that have survived, it has become apparent that in order to succeed they have to invest in innovation. Practical investments in effective technologies, such as cloud based solutions, will remove the burden of cutting costs and will help retail companies to improve efficiencies and internal communications. With this in place, retailers can ensure that ‘the customer comes first’ is more than a catch phrase and they can deliver a seamless customer experience.
Recently, 12,000 information security professionals met at a security information event and discussed the latest advancements and threats in security. Like most other sectors, retail is increasingly supporting a mobile workforce across multiple locations. Most of them have a growing need to safeguard sensitive hard and soft copy information and protect themselves against potential breaches of confidentiality. Industry experts flagged data integrity as ‘critical’ to business success.
In addition to security threats, corporate governance is of the utmost importance to companies operating across a variety of sectors, almost all of them under intense national and international regulatory scrutiny. With a growing array of complicated regulations to adhere to, from Sarbanes-Oxley, to ISO 9000 and Basel II, many professional service organisations as well as businesses across many other sectors do not have the time or the inclination to think about data migrations and upgrades.
Tim Wallis, CEO of Content and Code says “Microsoft’s cloud computing offering, Business Productivity Online Services (BPOS), is a hassle-free and secure approach to managing IT for companies, allowing them to focus on growing their core businesses. It is not about spending large sums of money on ‘new’ technologies; it is about capitalising on what they already have. BPOS brings together enterprise email, calendaring, team and project sites, instant messaging and web conferencing to create a more productive workplace and deliver cost-savings from day one.”
