Virtualization-Based Digitization of a Retail Store: An Enhanced Implementation of Digital Transformation

Abstract

The rise of neoteric technologies like Machine Learning, the Internet of Things, Cloud Services, etc has affected the life of a common man at various levels. Irrespective of the size or domain, almost all companies are now incorporating digitization to various degrees and thus progressing towards a new business model with little or no significance to geographical and physical barriers. This shift from traditional store models to automated entities is referred to as Digital Transformation. It is the simplified way of outlining how digital technologies are transforming and automating business operations across all organizations irrespective of their domain. This digital revolution relies on a whole range of machinery, networks, services, and operations to expand their power of communication, thus ensuring seamless integration with the technologies. At this juncture, there would be many challenges in both technical and non-technical aspects. To facilitate successful automation by resolving those issues, using the concept of virtualization can be very helpful. Virtualization is the process of creating a virtual instance of hardware resources like virtual applications, servers, or storage by logically separating them from the hardware. It enables multiple applications or operations to gain access to the hardware resources/ software resources of the host machine. In a sense, virtualization is always at the center of all this revolution providing a rock-solid foundation. For example, when digitizing an organization, machine learning algorithms are applied to the IoT data in addition to the organizational data. Given the huge size of data, companies adapting to this automation rely on cloud services for data management because of the reliability it provides. This issue is solved using the Edge Computing concept which is an advanced implementation of Virtualization. In this paper, we try to discuss such challenges and try to understand how virtualization can be useful in solving them. This can be exemplified using a hypothetical digitalization in a retail store scenario.