A cloud solution is a natural fit for logistics businesses. Tailor-made, managed cloud infrastructure can optimise your infrastructure, maximising performance, minimising business disruption, and streamlining processes. In order to secure the highest standard infrastructure to support your business needs, there are several factors you should consider.
Access to a global network
A Managed Service Provider (MSP) with access to a global network of data centres and vendors, without the need to coordinate this yourself, allows you to distribute compute and reduce the risk of cloud concentration. Particularly in the logistics industry, this connection and communication between all components of the chain is vital – dealing with issues becomes particularly resource-intensive and difficult when managing your infrastructure as an individual business. Management is important to this interconnected infrastructure – for example, if there was a disaster at one site, an MSP can manage your disaster recovery strategy, ensuring that you are able to fail over to another site, and restore from backups to minimise disruption to your services. If you had an unmanaged solution, you would need to manage this internally, using your own staff time and resources.
Access to a global data centre network also reduces latency. Speed of data transfer is vital in logistics, where real-time tracking and communication is required. If your logistics business is operating across multiple regions, relying on one central data centre can slow this transfer, as there is a greater physical distance between the end user and the location where the data is processed. When your data is distributed across multiple sites, this latency is greatly reduced, meaning your processes run at optimum speeds.
Support for edge and IoT devices
Edge computing is now central to the infrastructure of many logistics companies, and this is only predicted to increase. Cloud infrastructure supports and enhances the use of edge computing to the benefit of your business.
In logistics, edge computing can take the form of Internet of Things (IoT) devices in warehouses, cargo centres and delivery vehicles which can monitor variables including stock levels, vehicle locations, container temperature and more. When used in combination with a cloud solution, these insights can be processed to optimise routes, predict stock needs, and forecast maintenance requirements.
The IoT devices can be used to process data locally to the source, allowing for quicker processing of vital data versus transferring the data to a central location. Once this data is processed on the edge, the metadata can be sent to a central data centre for analysis and data enrichment to further streamline your future processes. Having this data stored on the cloud means it can be accessed across your operation, and backed up securely to prevent data loss.
To enjoy these benefits, you should consider a provider with flexible solutions, who can work with you to design a bespoke solution incorporating edge computing, IOT devices, and cloud environments to meet your exact needs. You can also consider working with an MSP who can manage your network, as this can be resource intensive to manage in-house.
Disaster recovery and business continuity
Logistics is a fast-paced industry, with disruptions having the potential to cause major issues. With cloud infrastructure, you benefit from robust back-up and disaster recovery solutions.
Disaster recovery refers to the process of resuming business operations after a disaster, which could include a cyber attack, natural disaster, power outage, or any other unforeseen event that puts your business at risk. These disasters have the potential to cause downtime, breaks in communications between sites, or loss of essential data.
An MSP can support your business with a disaster recovery plan consisting of processes and procedures to resume normal business operations in the shortest possible time. This can include regular backup of your data to a secondary site, meaning that in the case of a disaster, your data is not lost, and can be restored swiftly.
Cloud infrastructure also allows for high availability, which additionally reduces downtime and maintains business continuity. High availability means that infrastructure is continuously operational, with built-in hardware, software and environmental redundancies eliminating single points of failure.
The combination of high availability and disaster recovery that is possible with cloud computing is essential to logistics businesses, and should be a key consideration when reviewing your infrastructure options.
Unlimited scalability
Demand can fluctuate in the logistics industry for both predictable and unforeseen circumstances – for example political and global affairs impacting demand for certain products, seasonal variations impacting food production, or Black Friday and Christmas increasing delivery and shipping requirements.
Cloud solutions are ideal for reactive scalability, allowing you to increase and decrease your resources dynamically to handle this fluctuation.
When considering providers, it is important that they are transparent with their pricing. Some cloud providers will have low initial costs, but have dramatically escalating prices or hidden fees for scaling up your resources. You should also ensure your provider can be reactive with scalability, so that in the instance that your resource needs decrease, your platform is promptly scaled down and you are not left paying for resources you don’t need.
Are you considering a new cloud solution for your logistics business?
Find out how Hyve can support you on our dedicated logistics sector page, or contact our cloud experts.
