Impact and Benefits of Cloud Computing on E-Commerce Industry Development

Cloud computing is expected to be as transformative for business as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) or as e-commerce has been in recent years. Almost all the major IT companies have started to integrate cloud computing in their business models. Cloud computing enables a broad range of benefits for public and private sectors including, cost savings, access to organizations of any size and in virtually any location to computing power and software previously only available to the largest global companies, increased agility and speed for deploying new software solutions, and job creation. However, there are challenges to cloud computing for reaching its full potential. Businesses today are looking to technologies such as cloud computing, mobility, social networking and  big data  analytics to drive a new wave of innovation. Customer expectation from ecommerce systems have evolved significantly over a period of time. Today, customers are expecting a better and faster online experience that closely matches the in-store experience. Customers have access to several social networking mediums, which they want to utilize to get more information and opinions on the products to make their decisions. Businesses are facing a tough task in matching these increasing consumer demands. It is not only important for business to have an online presence but also to keep the online presence updated with the latest technology and business trends. Cloud computing through its different service models; address many technical and business challenges in building and managing modern ecommerce systems. Ecommerce have many benefits with cloud computing also face many threats which require more consideration .To have strong business base with the migration to cloud computing the following things have to be considered value of shifting IT, performance security, availability of risk to cloud service provider ,demand scalability, cost and time to market advantage.

As per Gartner report – by 2013, 40% of ecommerce deployment will use a complete SaaS ecommerce solution, 90 % of ecommerce sites will subscribe to atleast one Saas based service such as product reviews, product recommendation or social capabilities.