Amazon Evolution

Amazon Evolution

While Amazon remains the leading online retailer, there are some who will challenge whether or not the organization has shifted its core competencies. In the beginning Amazon was merely a resource for consumers to buy books at a reasonable cost without ever having to go to a store. This provided consumers with a way to get what they want for a reasonably small shipping fee without ever having to leave their house.

For the most part, these competencies are still intact; however, the focus has expanded in terms of products and services. The economic climate has affected businesses all around the world; Amazon is not different. Their approach now is to offer additional services such as Simple Storage Services (S3), Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), and the Mechanical Turk. The S3 has been developed to offer businesses a way to store data on Amazon disks which is another form of disaster recovery in a sense. The EC2 offers customers a way to use Amazons processing power; this is charged at an hourly rate. Mechanical Turk is a bundled service that combines processing power and people to help monitor traffic that takes place online.

This strategic move will do one of two things; set them apart from other online retailers or bury them in costs if not managed wisely. One particular area is data management. Although many organizations have reached out to do business with Amazon; this is still an area that is not entirely secure. Confidentiality and security are key factors in any data management business. Losing data in an online business could result in fraudulent activity on customers’ accounts and lead to legal issues for vendors who deal in any for m of online payments.

Amazon deals with large amounts of data, information, and knowledge related to customers and business partnerships. The data is a direct result of transactions that take place online by merchants and/or consumers. Data and information go hand and hand....