The COVID-19 pandemic has strained retailers’ digital capabilities as people shift from in-store to online shopping. During this time, Google has worked with retailers to develop their business activities and emphasized the significance of investments in digital platforms, specifically by modernizing e-commerce platforms in Google Cloud.
The modernization of Ecommerce is a complicated process, part of a long-term goal of different phases. However, a retailer can take some early steps right away to develop a conceptual framework for a flexible and responsive e-commerce platform that meets the customer’s expectations.
What is e-commerce migration?
Ecommerce migration involves shifting the presently operating E-commerce platform to the cloud and hence, establishing the concept of “lift and shift.” Experience has shown that this is frequent with retailers who have already virtualized and/or containerized e-commerce tasks and want to focus on getting into the cloud rapidly, with the ultimate goal of later being refactoring the cloud.
Even if it’s just an initial step, retailers who are embarking on an e-commerce migration strategy can derive the benefit from the Google Cloud’s flexibility, scalability, protection, and best-in-class cloud platform. Here are some of the benefits:
- Migration capabilities: Google Cloud’s Live Migration of compute instances means that servicing downtime is no longer required in case of improvements and servicing of the provider’s infrastructure. Migration with the assistance of the Compute Engine minimizes migration difficulty and effort for e-commerce workloads to help with the process of migration from the current server. With the support of either Google Cloud Professional Services or the specialized partners, the Migration Center can help ramp up the migration process for large and delicate workloads.
- Security: Google Cloud encodes all data in transit and at rest by default, helps to support the regulatory requirements of retailers, together with Payment Cardholder Industry (PCI), and secures end-user data.
- Network: Google Cloud Load Balancing and private networking cover vast geographical areas. Our load balancing agent will instantly distribute multi-regional traffic to the nearest GCP resource to the customer, which enhances the experience, leads to higher conversion, and also provides automatic high availability and disaster restoration for provincial inadequacies.
- AI & Data Analytics: Migration to Google Cloud opens up AI capabilities to enhance the customer experience. Google’s recommendations AI and other AI technologies can enhance conversions via AI-driven recommendations and AI-driven search results at the forefront of e-commerce.
In addition to these incentives, e-commerce migration tackles many of the problems that retailers face and is at the priority level in their minds because of the following reasons:
- Speed: Lack of agility to help the on-going business through digital platforms and to respond to elevated and more complex consumer demands.
- The total cost of ownership: High maintenance costs due to initial investment in on-site facilities and the ability to meet peak loads, and the need to introduce cost-reduction measures and focus exclusively on mission-critical workloads.
- Company shift: Moving from in-store to online imposes a burden on all-channel infrastructure, including distribution and supply chain capabilities.
- Legacy systems: Limitations on current legacy e-commerce networks impede the opportunity to modernize and respond to consumer demands.
Moving to Google Cloud via e-commerce migration solves these problem areas in the following ways:
- Help your company suit every traffic trend set by your clients with the scalability and flexibility features of Google Cloud. A retailer can also save its cloud resources by using Compute Engine Reservations that are useful at busy hours such as Promo Days, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, and other occasions when a retailer needs assured cloud resources.
- Support your company avoid downtime and revenue failure
- Support the company cut costs by shutting down idle power. You can also reduce costs even further by using Compute Engine Persistent Usage Discounts and Dedicated Usage Discounts for the regular workload.
- Enhance the speed and performance of your e-commerce platform. By having access to Google Cloud’s numerous regions around the globe, a retailer can serve customer-friendly requests by utilizing Google Cloud’s networking foundation.
