The virtual retailers face with new challenges every day, and development of business strategy requires them to expand and enter their e-commerce site for more channels and devices. Specialty stores, new product lines, instant offers, the launch of new geographic areas, among other movements, online retailers require to constantly innovate to differentiate themselves – creating new sites or new offerings should occur very quickly, and with good performance to handle peak traffic periods in which the activity is enhanced.

Therefore, the flexibility of the infrastructure of e-commerce sites must be very current and relevant. And the establishment of this infrastructure should not be an obstacle to innovation. The marketing of new offerings has enabled virtual retailers to stand out and grab more market share.

The development of cloud computing and SaaS-Software as a Service, for example, allows companies to overcome problems such as the operation of web servers, so they can concentrate on their core business – in this case, the trade. Not having to worry about infrastructure issues saves time to develop new projects. SaaS solutions meet the needs of flexibility and responsiveness of electronics retailers in general benefiting from a cloud infrastructure.

cloud computing solutions offer other attractions: The fixing of prices, which softens the “resource consumption”, a significant reduction in the total cost of ownership (TCO), security service on the rate of availability and performance (SLA), real flexibility and a high reactivity to adjust the power to the seasonality of the business of virtual retailers, international coverage and lower management and operational costs.

The cloud provides access to virtually unlimited resources, easily activated and billed per use. However, it is important to consider that this model also has impacts on the organization of flows and other operating points, such as:

Time to Market: How quickly the infrastructure creates new sites?

Performance: How to handle the increased volume of the catalog and web site traffic? How to ensure performance in remote geographical areas?

Security: What solution should be deployed against the attacks that are more frequent and sophisticated?

ROI: How to calculate return on investment of different solutions (external cloud, hosting), considering price / cost, independence from the vendor, security, etc..

You must set the limits: The treatment of network mapping, the sensitivity of the data, applications covered. With the explosion of offers, we see the emergence of contracts for services that respond to the promise of responsiveness in the cloud.

Thus, one cannot ignore the competitive advantages that cloud computing model can provide in business expansion.