Why Retailers Should Consider Cloud Computing for AI Adoption
To thrive in today’s retail climate, retailers are realizing the need to leverage the power of data and technology. Retailers produce enormous amounts of data, aggregated from various channels, such as point of sales, social media, and video streams, the retail industry’s data resource is waiting to be explored. Analyzing massive volumes of data on customers, product trends, and supply chains generate insights that can lead to better decision making and improved customer experience. However, data analysis can be complicated with outdated systems and data silos. Poor data infrastructure and data management can hinder the implementation of analytics solutions, jeopardize data security, and prevent real-time data sharing.
To overcome these obstacles, retailers are turning to cloud solutions and technologies to break down barriers to the easy flow of data, realize analytics capabilities and unlock data-driven insights. Here are some ways how cloud computing and data analytics can help retailers better serve their customers, decrease costs, and increase profits:
Reduced costs
With the cloud, you only pay for what you need. Overhead costs are eliminated, offering financial flexibility.
Agility
With retailers looking for ways to be more responsive to customer’s needs, organizations want a flexible infrastructure. With the cloud, investments in expensive and time-consuming infrastructure-maintenance, back-office tasks, hardware and software are minimized, leaving retailers free to focus on their main business.
Big Data
Keeping up with information on customer data has been difficult to manage in the past. The cloud allows retailers not only to store data, but also to sift through tons of unstructured data with mighty computing power, and thereby stay ahead of competition through advanced analytical prowess.
Development of Software
According to Salesforce, software development can be up to four times faster on the cloud, offering significant economies of scale. Best practices can be established and documented for beginners, virtual machines can be deployed, and software installed and tested much faster. In fact, only the cloud can provide the large testing and development environments that retailers need.
Better Upgradability
According to a recent survey, up to 18 working days are spent per month on patches and updates in the traditional mode. The larger the company, the more time and money spent on these tasks. By using cloud, retailers can avoid spending time and resources in patches and updates.
Greater Data Security
The best data security practices can be built into the cloud from the very start, including advanced firewalls, encryption, and intrusion detection.
Cyclops is a SaaS cloud-based AI retail analytics solution that can connect any surveillance camera to acquire, evaluate and interpret in-store data. To learn more about how Cyclops can help you gather various in-store data, check out our website and blog:
