Issue link: https://read.uberflip.com/i/1479550
"Companies are realizing that the cloud is not just an infrastructure strategy – it's a business strategy," says Miriam McLemore, an enter- prise strategist for Amazon Web Services. "By giving organizations access to an array of cutting-edge technologies, the cloud creates significant competitive advantages, both for improving internal opera- tions and for finding new ways to serve and delight customers." The cloud offers companies three main types of benefits: It greatly enhances the customer experience, facilitates innovation, and boosts business outcomes through cost savings and data insights. Pleasing Demanding Customers Online shopping, which increased exponentially during the pandemic, has dramatically raised the bar for customer expectations. Whether they're digital natives or digital immigrants, B2B or B2C buyers, today's shoppers don't just want, but expect businesses to understand their preferences and remember them across channels and devices. It's virtually impossible to do that without cloud-based analytics and marketing. For one thing, there's simply too much customer data for companies to analyze in a way that generates meaningful insights. And once you have those insights at hand, you need to act on them with targeted, multi-channel messaging that you can constantly tweak to reflect customers' changing preferences. That means using cloud- based automation. "One of the biggest benefits of the cloud is that it lets you understand your customers better and customize your offerings. With data-driven marketing, you can offer the right messages to the right people at the right time – the keys to success," McLemore says. " Companies are realizing that the cloud is not just an infrastructure strategy—it's a business strategy." —Miriam McLemore, enterprise strategist for Amazon Web Services 2