Page 4 - Artisan POS Whitepapers
P. 4
A Guide To:
Cloud-Based POS
Instead of buying For omnichannel businesses or being negligible. Long-term contracts
the infrastructure, a corporate stores, cloud-based solutions of five years or more add up – and
business owner rents with data stored offsite allows them without a contract, your provider is
it for a monthly fee a degree of consistency across all the free to raise rates as they wish. Not to
different platforms and locations. This mention that these subscriptions may
means that employees and managers offer only limited support and training
can access their data and conduct options, leaving employees to muddle
business virtually anywhere there is through learning the ropes on their own.
an internet connection, without being
tethered to a single location. Since the business owner doesn’t own
the system they are using, this leads to
Of course, for small businesses some distinct limitations. They may find
operating out of a few or just one themselves subject to regular updates
location, this may not be much of a help: pushed directly from the manufacturer,
With cloud-based POS, sales are reliant which can be a benefit for security
on internet connectivity. If your business but also introduce bugs and new
experiences an outage, you may have functionality that the business isn’t
to wait to be reconnected before you prepared for. And if the business owner
can resume operations. Only a few cloud opts to discontinue the subscription,
providers offer an offline mode to they could lose access to all the data
allow operation without an Internet they’ve hosted remotely – including
connection, usually for an additional fee. sales history, customer information
and inventory.
Many cloud-POS solutions are very
basic, with add-on services available This remote hosting of data is one of
for an additional charge, if at all. Add- cloud-POS’s benefits, but also one
on services from 3rd party vendors of its greatest vulnerabilities: Cyber
can create a finger-pointing support attacks and hacks on cloud data are
nightmare. Cloud-based solutions are increasing, both in frequency and
almost universally subscription-based severity, with the criminals targeting
in terms of payment. Instead of buying SMBs particularly. A recent server
the infrastructure, a business owner hack of toy maker VTech exposed the
rents it for a monthly fee. This can lead personal data of nearly 6.4 million
to lower upfront and implementation people – mostly children.
costs, but over time, the savings from
a subscription service often ends up
.02