Most retailers (87.5%) identify the hybrid cloud as the ideal IT operation model. Moreover, many of them (72%) plan to move some public cloud applications back on-premises.
These are the retail industry findings by Nutanix in its second Enterprise Cloud Index report, which measures retailers’ plans for adopting private, hybrid and public clouds.
According to this study, Retailers recognize that seamless customer experience is no longer a “nice-to-have” — it’s a critical factor in winning new customers and retaining existing ones — and flexible cloud infrastructure is critical to delivering it.
Retailers focus most on agility. This is one of the findings of this year’s report. Unlike in the broader IT industry, where cost is the top driver, retailers ranked the ability to accelerate IT deployments (54.3%) as the top factor in deciding the best cloud environment for each application. In order to adapt quickly to customer trends in an age of multichannel selling across many platforms, retailers are leading the pack in maximizing the flexibility of IT infrastructure to keep pace.
The report also states that security is top of mind for the retailers: Data showed that security heavily shapes retail cloud deployment plans.
Nearly two-thirds of respondents (63.6%) said security has significant influence on their future cloud deployments, with hybrid cloud specifically identified as the most secure (32%).
As data privacy regulations continue to tighten and expand, retailers are at the forefront of looking for ways to efficiently manage customer data securely. Hybrid cloud operating models offer the security and flexibility retailers need to stay ahead of policy changes.
Another finding of the survey says that retail leads in digital apps and IoT cloud deployments. According to the study, retailers outpace averages in using the public cloud to run digital applications and Internet of Things (IoT) applications.
They also run their business applications more often in the public cloud than other industries, with about 11% current penetration of multiple public clouds and about 19% penetration of a single public cloud.