Sunday 20 November 2016

Extreme Mobile Traffic Drives the Need for E-Commerce Data Centers

                                                                      Image Source: stratacore.com

As our technology driven culture rises in intelligence, so does our cellular usage. According to Ericsson, “The growth in mobile data traffic is due to both the rising number of smartphone subscriptions, in particular for LTE smartphones, and increasing data consumption per subscriber. This is forecast to result in a ten-fold increase in total traffic for all devices by the end of 2021.” 
A Pew Research study just last year reported that; “68% of U.S. adults have a smartphone, up from 35% in 2011.” It’s staggering how quick our society is in adjusting to smartphone ownership. From a business point of view, this increase in traffic has lead to ecommerce owners having to manage their own mobile data centers. Companies are beginning to realize that relying on third-party servers to maintain and keep track of order inquiries is ill advised. With the smartphone population growing, investing in a self-owned infrastructure to house telecommunications and storage systems is the smart move.  

Why are Data Centers so Important?

With such a high volume of sales and mobile traffic/visits, cellular ecommerce platforms are having a hard time keeping up. Outsourcing server information isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but if your brand is taking a considerable amount of consumers, it should reconsider its strategy. One way to do this would be to invest in a Data Center. A Data Center is basically a large group of networked computers used by companies for remote storage and the processing of large amounts of information. Why would a company need to set one up? Simple. Building mobile data centers can be low cost, allow for full optimization and customization for specific business demands, and can provide a large amount of compute power. In an article about massive Indian online retailer Flipkart, investing in a self-owned information storage, it explains; “E-Commerce manages the scale like nobody else. This means they’ll have to invest heavily in servers and switches in the next decade. It is much cheaper to invest in your own architecture and build it yourself.” This trend can drastically increase a business’s efficiency. 

                                                                      Image Source: huffingtonpost.com

Data Centers Make Media Assets Easily Assessable

The next action to revolve your future business storage plans around is how you’re going to manage all this information. Cellular information is collected in many different ways including customer service records, purchase history, website behavior, etc. As a business it’s imperative to securely maintain this information. Ecommerce site data centers fit this mold. Data centers get the information customers enter in through sale entries or other information sources and store it as you would normally think, except on a much bigger level.
Like a well organized book store, the information filed in searchable format, easily accessible across the company. As far as the cellular traffic itself, an information center is usually load balanced and distributes the work evenly over the network. They often use different internet service providers to allow for a greater amount of load sharing and overabundance. 

What are the Necessary Steps for Tracking Mobile Data?

One of, if not the best, tools on the market to analyze cellular information is Google Analytics. As the popularity of smartphone web searches increases dramatically, understanding the shopping behaviors of consumers is crucial for ecommerce businesses. Google Analytics helps by displaying the number of people viewing your mobile site, what keywords are being searched, how well optimized your website for Mobile, and the average amount of time customers spent on your site. Taking advantage of a tool like this could tremendously help your brand with growth and fully maximize your ecommerce platform’s potential.

Some advanced data centers may even provide analytics of their own, giving you a 360° view of your data journey.
Self-managed mobile data centers are looking more and more like the future of system information storage for businesses. Providing well maintained, secure and organized data, it’s the future of data management to keep your e-commerce information secure and available.