How Can AWS Cloud Reduce Time To Market For Your Digital Commerce?Posted by narayana on February 25th, 2020 The emerging technologies like cloud computing have leaped ahead in the right direction, and Amazon Web Services has won the battle among all existing service providers. commas-right
What exactly is Digital Commerce? Digital commerce, or more popularly, e-commerce, is a process and phenomenon of using the Internet to conduct commerce. Gartner defines digital commerce as “the buying and selling of goods and services using the Internet, mobile networks and commerce infrastructure.” Instead of having a retail store, you have an online retail store. Instead of going to your local shopping mall, you log on to Amazon and buy your groceries and home appliances. You pay using your credit card, net banking, digital wallet or even the COD facility. According to Statista, the worldwide digital commerce sales amounted to US$ 3.53 trillion in 2019 and this figure is projected to grow to US$ 6.54 trillion by 2022. To get In-depth Knowledge on AWS you can enroll for free live demo AWS Online Training How brands and manufacturers achieve Digital Transformation Digital transformation means doing your conventional business online. You begin to operate and deliver value to your customers through digital technology. In the contemporary world, to go digital, you need an e-commerce website, and you need a mobile app that allows your customers to buy from you using their mobile phones. In many cases, you no longer have a brick and mortar store. In many cases, you don’t even maintain an inventory. You simply take orders from your website or mobile app and then redirect those orders to your suppliers and manufacturers. From inventory management to order management to payment processing to bookkeeping to customer service to logistics and product delivery, every aspect of doing business becomes digital. Your entire way of doing business goes through a complete transformation. At the crux of your digital commerce is, of course, your website and your mobile app. Both your front-end and back-end of your website and mobile interface is stored on a remote server. You can manage your server in-house, or you can use one of the cloud hosting services like AWS. Since managing your servers in-house can be a humongous exercise both in terms of cost and effort, most of the businesses work with third-party cloud hosting services. One of the most widely used cloud hosting and cloud computing services is AWS – Amazon Web Services. What is AWS? AWS is a platform that provides scalable and cost-effective cloud hosting and cloud computing solutions. It is an on-demand service. When you host a website for your business, you work with a web hosting service. Depending on your package, it gives you online storage space and bandwidth. For example, your web hosting service may give you 10 GB of online storage space (for your HTML files, images, videos, scripts, APIs and databases). When your customers use your website (images, videos, text and various scripts) you use bandwidth. Commands are constantly being sent to the server and the server has to respond and this consumes server resources. In general terms, this communication between your visitors and your website is called bandwidth. Again, depending on your web hosting package, your hosting company may give you 500 GB or 1 TB of bandwidth. Even if you are using a few megabytes of online storage space and a few gigabytes of bandwidth, you pay a fixed cost unless you go beyond what you have been allocated. For a very small website, these specs are fine, but if you are planning on running a digital commerce website or a mobile app, you will very soon run out of your online storage space and the allocated bandwidth. After that, your cost will skyrocket. AWS on the other hand, using the economy of scale, gives you a combination of infrastructure as a service (IaaS), platform as a service (PaaS) and software as a service (SaaS), on a usage basis. You pay AWS as you go. It doesn’t charge you a fixed amount. This way, you can go on running your basic website on the web host of your choice and you can store your images, videos, and scripts on AWS. The amount of money that you spend hosting your data and you and your customers accessing data, scripts, and APIs, is drastically reduced when you partner with AWS for your cloud computing services. How AWS helps you grow your Digital Commerce business As mentioned above, if you run a digital commerce business, you need servers. Although many businesses choose to run their own servers or partner with lesser-known cloud computing services, running a server can be a full-fledged undertaking. You need to take care of hardware, software, power, cooling, data security and maintenance, all by yourself. You will need technical staff. You will need state-of-the-hour software. The moment your server goes online hackers will start targeting it. Basically, if you don’t go for a third-party cloud computing service like AWS, you will be spending more time taking care of your servers than running your business. With AWS, you can start running your business operations within a few hours. As soon as you have an account with AWS, the service takes care of the following: • Storage AWS has prebuilt and cost-effective digital commerce and retail modules that you can implement directly into your website or mobile app. From shopping cart to order processing, all the essential functions can be integrated with the help of friendly APIs. When you host your digital commerce resources on AWS, you don’t have to worry about any aspect of running a server. Your data, or the multiple copies of your data, reside on servers all over the world. This means, in case there is a data breach, the other servers immediately take over and your digital commerce website goes on working uninterrupted. Security patches are installed automatically. Your data is constantly backed up. You need to make simple API calls to easily access the most complex business functions. You don’t have to worry about power and air conditioning. All the needed modules to run a digital commerce website and mobile app are already available with AWS. It saves you money, it reduces your time to market. When you are developing a digital commerce interface or a digital commerce mobile app, plots of your resources go into interacting with the remote server and building basic functionalities. When you use AWS to build and host your digital commerce solution, your programmers and designers cannot just work remotely, they can also work more efficiently. Besides, the most important ingredients of a digital commerce setup are already built into the AWS setup. All you have to do is, access the APIs and you can be up and running in little time. Cost-saving is also one of the biggest benefits of using AWS. As mentioned above, it is an on-demand service. The amount of money that you spend on AWS depends on how much you use it. You don’t have to pay a lump sum amount every month or every year. The bill is generated according to your usage. This way, when you are developing your web app or your mobile app and you are not using many resources, you don’t spend lots of money, which is often the case when you use any other web hosting service. Being a world-class cloud computing service provided by a renowned brand, Amazon, you can completely rely on its availability. The top AWS clients include Facebook, LinkedIn, Netflix, BBC, ESPN, and Reddit. But there is no need to get intimidated by these big names. Due to its on-demand nature, even the smallest of digital commerce businesses can afford to host their websites and mobile apps on AWS. Our end-to-end AWS consulting services Looking for a consulting partner to build critical digital commerce solutions using Amazon Web Services? Through our consulting services, you can attain the fastest time to market whether you are migrating your existing digital commerce setup to AWS or planning on building service from the ground up. We provide our professional AWS consulting services to businesses of all sizes. We can help you design, architect, build, migrate and then manage your workloads and applications on AWS, 24 x 7. We can take care of your entire cloud computing operations while you focus on growing your business. Let us help you transform your business with the power of the Cloud.
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