By Dan Rafter
Dan Rafter is a freelance writer and editor with 15 years of journalism experience. Dan blogs via Contently.com.
Succeeding as a retailer is no easy task in today’s challenging economy. The national unemployment rate refuses to fall under 9%. Housing foreclosures continue to rise as home values keep falling. Consumers are more cautious than ever with their dollars. This means that they’re spending less at their local hardware store, beauty salon, grocery store or bakery.
Retailers who want to survive in this tough economy must cut their costs. One way to do this, and one that is growing in popularity among savvy retailers, is to rely on cloud computing services.
When businesses rely on cloud computing, they are simply removing their business computing programs from their own in-house computers to offline hosts. Most computer users are already familiar with cloud computing even though they might not realize it. Users who get their email from services such as Yahoo! or Hotmail, for instance, are using cloud computing.
For retailers, the benefits of cloud computing are many. Instead of investing in a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint, retailers can log onto the home page of a company that gives them access to a program that works in a similar way.
It’s easy to see more small retailers switching from hosting their own in-house software programs to relying on the cloud to do it for them.
For one, such a move makes obvious financial sense. Instead of paying for an expensive piece of software, businesses simply pay a host company for the amount of time they spend using their software. As a recent post on the Microsoft blog puts it, retailers who commit to the cloud won’t waste financial resources on software they use infrequently
That’s the obvious benefit of cloud computing services. But taken alone, however, it’s not enough to create a future in which cloud computing is the norm. But there are many other benefits that might do this.
For instance, many retailers rely on the work of employees who spend much of their time on the road. Salespeople, consultants and photographers can’t do their jobs while shackled to their desks. Retailers who connect to cloud computing services, though, can give these employees the freedom they need to survive.
As the Microsoft post says, these desk-less employees can log onto shared servers — hosted offline — from wherever they happen to be. They can read email messages from the airport and update PowerPoint presentations from their hotel rooms, saving the results in shared files that their co-workers can easily update from wherever they happen to be.
By using cloud computing, retailers can save money during those times of the year in which their business naturally lags.
Landscaping companies, for instance, see their business grind to a halt during the winter months. Instead of paying full price for presentation software or accounting programs that they’ll rarely use during certain months, retailers can instead “rent” these programs from cloud computing sites for those periods in which their business is actually booming.
In a recent paper, consulting firm Accenture wrote that retailers can rely on cloud computing services to focus more on the needs of their customers, reduce their own costs of doing business and reach a wider net of customers. The company wrote, too, that no leader in business today can afford to ignore cloud computing.
That’s a bold statement coming from an established consulting firm such as Accenture. It’s also a message that retailers need to hear. With the amount of money that retailers can save by going with cloud computing, it’s easy to picture a time in which businesses who rely solely on the cloud for their computing needs are the norm, and not the exception.
