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The biggest lesson from the AWS US-East-1 region outage on October 20th, is that most of the affected companies were lacking resources to ensure business continuity. It shows that even when using some of the most trusted and reliable cloud solutions, it is unreasonable to expect a 100% uptime. 

Therefore, to ensure that your business continues to operate even when a major cloud provider is experiencing issues, you need to have backups of data, as well as computational resources in other places, either with other cloud providers, or on-site solutions.

When a single cloud region fails, the most cost-effective solution would be to configure your services to also be hosted on other cloud regions, though this could still fail if multiple cloud regions fail, or something breaks at the provider level, upstream of cloud regions. Therefore it is best to have usable, fallback infrastructure, either on site or with other cloud providers such as Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, or DigitalOcean.

There are several operational blind spots this outage exposed. For years businesses chose to mostly select a single provider to host most of their infrastructure to reduce costs and complexity. This however comes with risks as seen on October 20th. If your single provider fails, your business is left stranded and with very limited control over the situation. 

Such potential failures should be taken into account when designing services that are critical to always remain operational, in these cases having infrastructure mirrored across providers, or onsite fallback solutions may be worth investing in, even when the cost increases significantly.

Following this outage, business leaders should initiate several things.

First, create an inventory of hosts and services that they operate and offer to their customers, prioritise which services and hosts are critical to remain operational at any cost, and which services can be temporarily disrupted without creating a significant disruption (e.g. for a messaging app you may prioritise the functionality of being able to send and receive text messages and giving less priority to the functionality that enables sending images videos, stickers, read receipts, etc.) create a plan, budget and timeline to implement this additional redundancy. 

It’s also important to create a disaster recovery plan, or update the existing one by reconsidering the potential risks, and issues that may arise from similar failures and create solutions for these potential issues. This saves valuable time when a similar issue occurs allowing teams to efficiently and without hesitation or second guessing ensure that critical systems are restored as soon as possible.

One of the most effective ways to ensure a swift recovery from third party cloud failures is having a predetermined plan on what to do when such an issue occurs. It ensures that teams do not need to come up with solutions or make difficult decisions when time is of the essence, allowing them to promptly implement any required changes. Having multiple alternative lines of communication is also critical to ensure efficient coordination of recovery efforts.

The post AWS Outage Has Taught Business Leaders Several Lessons appeared first on SiteProNews.

Introduction 

E-commerce keeps breaking records in 2025. Brands are always under strain to create systems able of rapid development since worldwide internet sales are projected to top $8 trillion. 

That’s where the right Ecommerce Tools and Ecommerce Platform Software come in. They not only host your store, but they also help you expand, automate, and make each interaction with a customer special.  

This research lists the best platforms that will help businesses grow with confidence in 2025.  

Why Scalability Matters  

Scalability refers to how well your e-commerce store can accommodate increasing amounts of customers, product and data without crashing. Modern Ecommerce Platform Software gives you:  

• Cloud scaling for when traffic goes up  

• Putting all the sales channels for social media and the marketplace together  

• Automating things with AI so that decisions can be made more quickly  

• Support for transactions in several currencies all over the world  

You feel like you’re failing every time you improve, instead of succeeding.  

Must-have Features of Ecommerce Platform Software  

Check off these boxes before signing up for your platform: 

• Pages that load quickly get faster and better at what they do.  

• API integrations and modifications for future growth  

• Ready for shopping on your phone  

• Security and Compliance (SSL and PCI-DSS) 

• AI for personalization and automation  

• Help with selling on a lot of different channels 

• Different prices for different phases of growth  

The Best Ecommerce Platform Software for Businesses That Want to Grow in 2025 

 1. Shopify Plus 

Best for: D2C and mid-market businesses who want to develop quickly  

What Sets It Apart:  

• Cloud hosting is almost always up.  

• More than 6,000 links to apps  

• AI powered analytics and automated workflows  

2. BigCommerce for Businesses  

Perfect For: Merchants catering to consumers as well as companies 

How it differs: 

• Architecture for commerce without a head  

• Open-source APIs and advanced SEO tools  

3. Adobe Commerce (Magento)  

Best for: Businesses with groups of developers  

How it differs: 

• It’s a completely open source, and you may change it in any manner you see fit.  

• You can customize AI with Adobe Sensei.  

• Works with a lot of stores and countries  

4. WooCommerce  

Best For: WordPress Sites with Content, especially small to medium-sized businesses. 

How it differs: 

• Free and open source  

• A lot of plugins to choose from  

• A base that is good for SEO Verdict: Growth that doesn’t cost a lot and enables you to grow.  

5. The Cloud for Salesforce Commerce  

Best for: Large stores that have locations all over the world  

How it differs: 

• CRM embedded in for personalized experiences  

• Predictive AI analytics and automation  

• Business growth infrastructure throughout the world  

6. Wix eCommerce and Squarespace Commerce  

Best for: Inventors and small companies  

How it differs: 

• Design with AI tools that you can move around  

• A complete set of tools for hosting and advertising  

• Not too expensive for startup enterprises  

Brief Summary: 

New tools and trends for purchasing online in 2025  

New ecommerce solutions come out in 2025 that change how businesses sell and grow:  

• AI chatbots and product suggestions  

• Headless and Composable Commerce Architectures  

• Shopping using your eyes and ears  

• Using AR for Virtual Try-Ons  

• Connections that make a supply chain last  

These won’t annoy users, make things easier, and be ready for the future if everything is with technology from past decades to the future.  

How to Decide on Software for Your Online Store  

A simple process often looks like:  

1. Set goals: Identify what your goals are for 12 to 24 months from now.  

2. Check Technical Skills: Pick a platform that your developers will find easy to use, or even better a platform that most anyone will find easy to use. 

3. Check the integrations: Make sure your tech stack is well integrated with your marketing, CRM, and even ERP technologies as possible. 

4. Choose software that is capable of evolving without switching platforms. 

5. When figuring out ROI, don’t just look at the expense up front. Add help and upkeep. 

Pro Tip: Start with a base that can grow, even if you’re little today. 

Conclusion 

E-commerce will entail more than a website by 2025. As your business increases, so should your e-commerce platform software. Each alternative has benefits and drawbacks: Shopify Plus allows you to grow, BigCommerce helps expand functionality, Magento can be tailored and changed, WooCommerce has a low-cost starting point, Salesforce Commerce Cloud has company intelligence, and Wix/Squarespace make it easy for people to launch their business quickly.  

Once you select the right e-commerce tools and channels, automation and analytics will become available along with a web of new channels. Use one of these platforms to fulfill your goals for sustainable long-term growth with your D2C shop. Your platform should run your store now and grow with you. E-commerce needs to be able to grow after 2025 and beyond.  

FAQs 

Q1. 2025: Why must I begin employing an ecommerce program?

Starting with WooCommerce or Wix eCommerce is straightforward and helpful.

Q2. What platform should I employ to expand?

Magento (Adobe Commerce) or Salesforce Commerce Cloud are available for choices.

Q3. Compared to traditional e-commerce platforms, cloud-based e-commerce systems make it simpler to develop a company? 

Yes, cloud-based platforms will always attract more visitors naturally compared to normal e-commerce platforms.

Q4. Is it simple to go from one platform to another?

If you plan, it’s possible. A lot of them provide services and plugins that help you transfer. 

Q5. Why are E-commerce marketers so hungry to take advantage of AI?

It can market businesses faster by optimizing personalization, forecasting, and automation.

The post Top E-Commerce Platforms for Scalable Online Businesses in 2025 appeared first on SiteProNews.

In the healthcare industry, keeping up with rapidly changing technology is a necessity. Oftentimes, the evolution of technology and healthcare are linked to one another. Before the invention of the digital age, medical records needed to be stored on pen and paper and stored en masse in file rooms. Then, the computer and computer storage systems entirely revolutionized how patient data is found, stored, and managed. Now, technology’s next major leap comes in the form of artificial intelligence and has already affected how individuals and companies alike think of business operations. So, what role does AI have in the healthcare industry?

Traditionally, AI has seen some utilization as of 2024. However, the usage of AI agents is like a digital employee or chatbot, which is a massive under-utilization of technology. Instead of using it to handle troubled customers who need assistance, modern healthcare AI agents can handle much more. Because of this misapplication, over 60% of healthcare businesses tried AI but under 1% of all applications used by these businesses actually have AI. Rather than working in customer-facing roles, AI has seen major strides by helping employees work on the back-end.

But what would it actually take for provider groups and health systems to actually adopt AI technology? Over 80% of all healthcare staff believe an AI needs to reduce the amount of administrative burden they have and enable them to be more productive at their jobs. Alongside this, over 70% believe AI needs to be easy to use and access reliable and trustworthy data sources. Fortunately, some AI have already demonstrated some of this functionality.

For example, one of the most common questions in healthcare is ‘Do you have insurance?’ And, if they do, someone has to manually enter the system, get their proof of insurance, and input the details manually. However, this can be reduced to just a few seconds by leveraging the power of AI. By providing proof of insurance such as an ID card, referral order, or requisition forms, AI can extract the data and save it to the customer’s profile in the patient management system. Not only does this cut down the amount of time spent on menial tasks, but this makes the patient intake a much more pleasant experience.

Moreover, once a patient’s insurance information has been noted, AI can go a step farther. By accessing an insurance company’s portal or voice-calling a representative, they are able to verify a customer’s benefits and estimate the out-of-pocket cost for a visit. However, the skillset of AI is far more expansive.

Aside from patient intake, it is able to process the heftiest administrative tasks such as processing inbound referral requests. They can also catalogue inbound documents and process prescription refills. On the other hand, it is also able to submit prior authorization requests and verify the status of any requests it puts out. But the most important factor regarding AI is how efficiently it can do tasks, not just the tasks it can do.

Provider groups and health systems that deploy AI agents in healthcare see significant streamlining across the board. When it comes to processing referrals, for instance, the average time from reception to completion goes from 1 business day to under a minute. On average, the time saved from automatic document processing is over 50 hours per week. Financially, this means that existing expenses for a healthcare business are slashed between 40% and 70%. While slimming down on cost, the time saved with healthcare staff also has another effect. Giving employees more time in their shift means more productivity leads which can increase revenue by as much as 20%.

Putting aside the clear financial upsides, how else can AI benefit your healthcare business’s work environment? By giving time back to the employees, they can spend more time with patients rather than sitting alone in waiting rooms. This results in faster diagnoses and a better overall patient experience. Because of these overwhelming merits, as much as 71% of all healthcare workers believe agentic AI will be an integral part of healthcare in the next 5 years.  So how can healthcare companies get their hands on this technology and stay ahead of the game?

Firstly, it’s important to pick the right AI for the job. Many of the popular AI are known as ‘public-facing’, which means that they can only access data from publicly available sources. While this is useful for individuals wanting a broad spectrum of information, this is simply unusable for companies who want it tailored to their business. Furthermore, public-facing AI are not HIPAA compliant and cannot access confidential patient data needed to carry out back-end requests.

Fortunately, AI healthcare agents make implementing an AI into your business easy. Furthermore, their AI was designed with healthcare businesses in mind, so there’s no need to worry about HIPAA compliance and the AI is meant to maximize the time spent caring for patients. Regardless of what discipline or what kind of patients your business treats, implementing an AI is the best way to streamline your business and get back to saving lives.

The post How AI Is Making Major Strides in the Healthcare Industry appeared first on SiteProNews.

Budget planning season is here, and for many organizations, software development represents a significant investment. Whether you’re planning to build a new platform, modernize legacy systems, or expand existing capabilities, creating an accurate budget requires more than collecting quotes from vendors.

After nearly two decades in custom software development, I’ve seen countless budget cycles. The organizations that succeed don’t just look at price tags; they approach software budgeting strategically. Here are five principles that can help you build a realistic, defensible software budget for the year ahead.

Start with your core requirements

Custom software costs scale directly with complexity. A simple customer portal might take four months and cost $150,000, while an enterprise platform with multiple integrations could easily exceed $1 million and span a year or more.

Before requesting proposals, define what you actually need versus what you’d like to have. This is where the concept of a minimum viable product (MVP) becomes valuable. Strip your requirements down to the essential functionality that will deliver business value. Separate the “must-haves” from the “nice-to-haves.”

This approach serves two purposes. First, it gives you a baseline budget number. Second, it provides a clear foundation you can build on over time. Software is never truly finished; it evolves with your business. Starting with core functionality and adding features in phases often proves more cost-effective than trying to build everything at once.

Begin with a smaller initial phase to understand the full scope of your project. This could be a formal product planning engagement or a dedicated design phase. While it adds upfront costs, investing time in early planning typically reduces expensive changes later in development. You might spend $20,000 to $40,000 on discovery and planning, but this investment often saves many times that amount by preventing costly rework during development.

Build realistic timelines into your budget

Most software projects take longer than expected. On average, a moderately complex project requires five to six months, though many extend to eight months or beyond. Smaller projects might be completed in less time, but anything substantial demands patience.

This is because software development encompasses far more than writing code. It includes user experience design, technical architecture, database design, API integration, testing, and deployment. Each phase requires specialized expertise and careful execution.

When planning your budget, account for this timeline by breaking spending across quarters. Most development firms bill as work progresses, so longer timelines naturally spread costs throughout the year.

You might be tempted to add more developers to accelerate delivery. Larger teams can indeed work faster and more efficiently up to a certain point. However, beyond an optimal team size, adding more developers creates coordination overhead that often slows progress while increasing costs. The most effective development happens with appropriately sized, focused teams that communicate clearly and maintain consistent context. This reflects the classic project management triangle: you can optimize for two of three factors—cost, timeline, or quality. Want high quality at lower cost? Plan for a longer timeline. Need it quickly with high quality? Expect higher costs. Understanding these tradeoffs helps you make informed decisions about where to invest your budget.

Empower a product owner to make decisions

One of the most common causes of budget overruns is decision paralysis. When no single person has authority to make choices, development stalls while teams wait for approvals or consensus.

Select and empower a product owner who will own the project and make decisions. This person should understand both business objectives and user needs, and have the authority to make choices without requiring committee approval. They should be available to answer questions, review work in progress, and make trade-off decisions when needed.

This isn’t just about speed. A consistent decision-maker ensures the project maintains a coherent vision rather than accumulating compromises from multiple stakeholders. When questions arise about priorities, features, or design choices, your product owner can provide immediate direction rather than letting development teams sit idle while awaiting consensus.

Expect estimates to evolve

No matter how thorough your planning, software projects contain unknowns. The design phase might reveal workflow complications that weren’t apparent in initial discussions. A feature that seemed straightforward could require complex data transformations. A third-party API might lack documentation or require creative workarounds.

On that note, third-party integrations deserve special mention. Unless a development team has worked with a specific API before, accurately estimating integration effort is nearly impossible. You’re working with someone else’s code, which may or may not be well-documented or logically structured.

Responsible development firms account for this uncertainty. Quality estimates include assumptions and present ranges rather than fixed numbers. If you’ve spoken with multiple firms, you’ve probably noticed significant variation in their estimates. This reflects different assumptions about scope, interpretations of requirements, and levels of experience with similar projects.

A practical approach is to budget for 150% of the estimate you receive. You likely won’t spend the full amount, but if complications arise, you’ll have room to address them without emergency funding requests.

Plan beyond the initial build

Software isn’t a one-time purchase. Once your platform launches, it requires ongoing maintenance to remain functional and secure.

Code maintenance represents just one piece. You’ll need to pay for hosting infrastructure, which scales with usage. Software licenses, API fees, monitoring tools, and backup systems all carry recurring costs. As your user base grows, these expenses grow with it.

Security updates alone justify ongoing development resources. Vulnerabilities emerge regularly, and unpatched systems become targets. Beyond security, you’ll want to fix bugs, optimize performance, and adapt to changes in the platforms and services you integrate with.

If you built an MVP, expect to add features over time. Budget for this expansion work. Many organizations find that their software becomes more valuable as they refine it based on real user feedback.

Budget planning also means considering DevOps practices: the processes and tools that manage deployments, monitor system health, and ensure reliability. Modern DevOps requires specialized expertise, but the investment typically pays off through reduced downtime and faster response to issues.

Finding the right partner matters most

Switching development teams midway through a project creates significant cost and risk. New developers need time to understand existing code, even when it’s well-structured and documented. They’ll inevitably make different architectural choices, leading to inconsistency. The ramp-up period slows progress while still consuming budget.

This doesn’t mean you should stay with a team that’s failing to deliver. Sometimes change is necessary. But understand that transitions are expensive and disruptive.

The better approach is to invest time upfront in finding a development partner you trust. Look for teams with relevant experience, clear communication practices, and realistic assessments of your project. Ask for references and speak with their previous clients about how they handled challenges.

Once you’ve found the right partner, commit to the relationship. A team that knows your codebase works more efficiently than one starting fresh. They’ll spot opportunities for improvement and understand the reasoning behind past decisions.

Moving forward with confidence

Software budgeting involves more uncertainty than most capital investments. You’re creating something that doesn’t exist yet, using technologies that are constantly evolving, to solve problems that may shift as you build.

The organizations that budget successfully accept this ambiguity while building in appropriate contingencies. They focus on clear communication, empower decision-makers, and view software as an ongoing investment rather than a one-time purchase.

As you prepare your budget for the year ahead, remember that the cheapest proposal rarely delivers the best value. Look for partners who ask good questions, provide realistic timelines, and demonstrate understanding of your business context. The conversations you have during the budget planning process often reveal as much about potential partners as the numbers they propose.

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