Last year the UK continued to lead online sales in Europe as the European online retail sales grew 18 per cent and are predicted to grow 13 per cent this year, reaching €92 billion, according to a five-year forecast from Forrester Research. This figure, coupled with the statistic that 57 per cent of adults now shop online, demonstrates that a shift has occurred from the high street to online. The retail industry has trail blazed the online shopping phenomenon, but other industries - like manufacturing - are starting to explore this area, and in turn consider what infrastructure is needed to can compete in this new arena. How are they hosting their online presence? In-house, datacentres, hosted services? Do they have the bandwidth required for transactions and data share? What DR do they have in place to ensure they are as close to 100 per cent uptime as possible? EU online retail is expected to grow at a 10 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and 68 per cent of the online population will have made a purchase on the web. Is the UK industry ready for this? And if not, we should ask ourselves: do we want a slice of the €30 billion that 72 per cent of the UK’s online population spent last year?
