Mandar Naik, Microsoft on How Cloud can Help eCommerce Business?

The second session at the eSparks event on Saturday was on Cloud Strategy for eCommerce ventures by Mandar Naik, director, Open Source Strategy at Microsoft. Microsoft’s ambition of world domination has been well documented, but even the software behemoth can only ignore the cloud platform at its own peril. Through his session, Mandar demonstrated in plenty what Microsoft wanted to achieve through the cloud platform. The need for eCommerce companies to prioritise what they want on cloud is very important according to Mandar. So if economics comes on top, usage patterns, management of IT and infrastructure management and the need for automation are other things that an eCommerce company should prioritize. Equally important is the need for elasticity in your resources, “you should be able to give back what you do not want or immediately have lots of what your business needs,” said Mandar. Elasticity on cloud is important so that eCommerce companies can manage demand and customers better.

Mandar urged companies to integrate cloud strategy with their business strategy right from day one. What will be your computing patterns? How often will your business/ app be inactive? How are you growing? Can you do predictable costing? If you have 24x7 steady operations, then how will your business look like? What are the demands such full-time operation demands? These are questions that eCommerce companies should buffer for when they think cloud, and Mandar assured that cloud has the capability to answer all these questions.

The need to have a resilient mindset and to continuously scale is important to any eCommerce business success, said Mandar. “There will be times when your website is down, when you loose your database or your files, when your hard disk fails. But you need to get up, dust yourself and move ahead,” suggested Mandar. Having a plan B incase of sudden crisis will ensure there is not much time lost and nimble-footedness is important for an eCommerce venture. Cloud platform gives you the option of having a backup and immediately getting your business up and running when there is a crisis. Microsoft’s Azure is one such option for businesses seeking help.

Mandar’s final advice on cloud was the need to use the best model of cloud available in the market today. Some of the options for eCommerce businesses to choose from are: Have everything on premise, invest in IT and manage everything yourself. Or have a two-way split where you give away some part of your business to cloud and retain a part of it internally, for example it could be when you don’t give your application access to others. Or where cloud is used as a platform for service, where the business owner controls key aspects of the business and leaves the rest for cloud. Or a complete outsourcing of business to the cloud service provider. Whichever model it is that eCommerce companies choose from, it is important to decide that the cloud platform they choose gives them the flexibility to manage their cloud infrastructure. Choosing a rigid cloud service provider or a rigid cloud model will be detrimental to any eCommerce business emphasized Mandar. “Whatever you do on cloud, you should be able to run your biz on your own terms,” said Mandar.

We at YourStory.in thank E-Sparks Title Sponsor, Microsoft, Financial Technology Partner, Intuit, Associate Sponsors, ReferralCandy and Aramex and Exhibitor, Moolya