Get Started on your Journey to the Cloud Retail Industry

Introduction

Microsoft in partnership with the Fujitsu Center of Excellence offers this paper as a starting point for understanding how to approach development of a comprehensive cloud computing strategy. The retail enterprise IT environment serves all aspects of business operations including shopper engagement, product delivery and core business operations. To support the varied needs many retailers are embarking on a “hybrid” approach to delivering cloud services. This simply means mixing on premises service delivery with hosted or public service delivery to achieve the definition of an effective cloud computing environment.
Microsoft recognizes several driving forces behind retail cloud computing adoption. While there are many reasons why businesses might consider the cloud, our experience and research has shown 3 prevailing reasons:

1. Improved IT and business agility
2. Better economics
3. Growing user expectations

From an economic point of view cloud computing is defined by how much of the infrastructure is managed by a cloud provider versus being managed by the retailer. The graphic below shows the 4 different approaches (vertical) to cloud computing: Private, IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. The horizontal portion of the graphic shows the layers that make up enterprise solutions and the mix of self-managed versus vendor managed responsibility; as it relates to the cloud approach. This offset is where the economic benefits of scale can be
realized.
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