A regular topic of discussion on this blog has been the growing trend of repatriation from public cloud workloads and organizations moving toward hybrid and multi-cloud strategies. By allowing workloads to move between environments as computing needs and costs change, organizations enjoy greater data deployment options, a higher level of flexibility and more ROI-friendly computing environments.
Numerous industries are repatriating to hybrid ecosystems for such benefits, retail being one of them. In a fiercely competitive landscape, retailers understand that in order to attract and retain business, a seamless customer experience is essential, and flexible cloud architecture is key in delivering that experience. In the wake of the recent NRF (National Retail Federation) conference taking place in New York City, the topics of key cloud strategies and the growing popularity of hybrid ecosystems in retail are taking center stage.
According to research covered by ZDNet, 72% of retailers have moved or plan to move some public cloud applications back to on-premises infrastructure, and data center usage among retailers increased 14% over the past year. Furthermore, hybrid deployments are proving to be the industry’s favorite operating model now and in the future, with retailers planning to increase hybrid cloud usage by 43% and mutli-cloud usage by 10% over the next five years.
Whereas cost is typically the primary cloud strategy driver across industries, increased agility is the greatest reason for the popularity of hybrid ecosystems within the retail sector. To adapt to ever-evolving customer trends across a variety of platforms and channels, 54.3% of retailers rank the ability to accelerate IT deployments through flexible infrastructure as the top deciding factor in choosing a cloud environment.
No matter the reason for adopting a hybrid ecosystem or which environment you transfer workloads and applications to, Markley is committed to helping you every step of the way. To learn more about Markley’s data center, cloud and connectivity offerings, please reach out to us at info@markleygroup.com.
