Retail C-Suiters: 3 Facts You Need to Know About Hybrid- & Multi-Cloud

40% of retail shoppers will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. What’s more, one-fourth of all shoppers will abandon their online cart if the website they’re using crashes. And despite the very real economic value of maintaining a fast, always available eCommerce site, many retailers still fail to accommodate traffic spikes, though companies are spending $62 billion every year on unused IT capacity.

That’s according to the Google Cloud Next session on “How Retailers Prepare for Black Friday on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).” If you’re struggling to solve these expensive challenges for your organization, you’re not alone, but it’s imperative to nail down a modern, strategic IT strategy as we head into 2020. In our eyes, that involves developing a solidhybrid- or multi-cloud platform strategy.

Gartner has reported that three-fourths of all midsize and large organizations will have implemented a hybrid IT and/or multi-cloud strategy by 2021. By 2022, “public cloud services will be essential for 90% of business innovation.” Retail is one of the top verticals moving to the cloud; after all, the cloud’s main benefits – scalability, speed, cost-effectiveness – are especially critical in the fast-moving, customer-centric retail space.

Below, we break down three facts retail c-suite executives need to know about hybrid and multi-cloud.

#1: When seamless scalability is the goal, cloud is the solution. 

We know seamless is the magic word in retail, and it’s a term that simply describes cloud better than its on-premise counterpart. The cloud’s seamless scalability is the most notably useful attribute when it comes to retail. Companies can instantly scale up for sales, peak season and unplanned traffic surges, and then easily scale back down for slower cycles. Plus, the cloud allows retailers to only pay for the capacity they use, which keeps IT costs down to allow for better use of expenditures: say, for a new website or app or increased marketing efforts.

#2: GCP is focusing on retail.

Google Cloud recently unveiled a new vertical strategy surrounding retail. As TechCrunch reported, the company’s solutions package for retail includes a partnership with Salesforce to deliver chatbot technology and contact center AI tools that improve the customer experience. Google Cloud is now offering a premium version of its eCommerce Hosting, helping retailers avoid downtime and disruptions, even during peak season.

Google Cloud is also offering retail-specific, AI-based tools such as Google Contact Center AI and Recommendations AI. For more on Google Cloud’s retail solutions, click here.

#3: GCP’s Anthos platform supports the fluidity of retail and helps you keep up with consumer demands. 

The Google Cloud team was busy at Next ‘19 with the launch of Anthos, a multi- and hybrid-cloud platform that lets customers build, run and manage applications across cloud and on-premise environments. It allows enterprises to run containerized workloads in GCP, on-premise, or even in other cloud platforms, enabling a seamless hybrid cloud environment for the first time ever.

Before the launch of Anthos, building multi-cloud strategies required substantial custom development, while Anthos works “out-of-the-box” with very little configuration required. Anthos transforms your architectural approach, so you can focus on innovation and move faster than ever without compromising security or increasing complexity. Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) – a managed, production-ready environment for deploying containerized applications – plays a key role in the expansion of the Anthos platform since containerization is the foundation of the service. Read more about how GKE enables retailers to optimize Black Friday / Cyber Week sales here.

GKE and Anthos streamline load balancing for retailers, helping them to build scalable container clusters. This allows applications to respond rapidly to changes in business demand, which optimizes performance and minimizes cost. Anthos also simplifies operations in general, empowering retailers to spend less time managing applications while achieving greater awareness, consistency, and control. The platform ultimately increases business agility, gets products to market faster, maximizes resource utilization, and future-proofs technology investments.

Before you can leverage Anthos, you need to make sure all of the proper pieces are in place for it to run effectively. Register for our complimentary webinar, “5 Steps to Getting Hybrid-Cloud Ready with Anthos,” taking place November 21 at 1:00 pm EST to learn how you can prepare your environment to take advantage of this groundbreaking technology.