Retail Reliant on Hybrid Edge IT Strategy
As retail technology evolves to include more advanced point-of-sale systems, facial recognition software and other technologies designed to enhance the customer experience, retail enterprises are rapidly reevaluating where and how data is stored and processed to support the growing amount of data required for daily operations.
Nearly 63% of retailers surveyed are taking a hybrid approach to data processing and storage, leveraging a combination of in-house data center assets, colocation services and cloud services. The primary driver behind this strategy is the availability of services at locations that are convenient to their customer base.
The ongoing development of data sovereignty laws worldwide, along with increased security threats and the evolution of compliance around payment processing, has retailers focused on highly secure, yet cost-effective data storage solutions. Retailers also require workload flexibility and low-latency connectivity between locations and centralized offices. A hybrid approach – where primary applications and workloads are stored and processed at the edge, and less critical workloads, as well as archived data, remain in centralized on-premises data centers or cloud deployments – will reduce the overall spend while meeting the evolving needs of retailers.