March 9, 2015
With third-party computing, all actions are performed through the Internet on the host’s website and then saved to the third-party’s massive hard drive, rather than the user’s personal computer memory. The implementation of third-party computing (known as "the Cloud") in the material handling industry has developed in the form of warehouse management software. While clouds offer clients lower operating costs and increased availability of programs, the lack of privacy remains the biggest deterrent for customers weighing the pros and cons of cloud computing, apart from other items such as the delay in troubleshooting and the question of data ownership within the cloud. Nevertheless, alternative solutions as Software as a Service (SaaS) make the difference since they allow working in a shared server but it permits to store private information separately. Similarly, Interlake Mecalux offers a subset version of its EasyWMS, EasyWMS Autoinstall as a SaaS, that allows multiple warehouses to have a centralized point of connectivity and data storage, which gives the client the ability to access data from multiple warehouses, rather than simply the warehouse they are in.