Winning the Omnichannel Retail Arms Race: 5 Keys to Success in 2013 and Beyond

5. Rock-solid data security: The traditional approach to securing customer and financial data is to lock it behind a firewall, but omnichannel commerce is conducted from anywhere via the cloud. Designed to be online, the best cloud solutions deliver security far more safely than legacy operational systems adapted for the internet.

Is all this just a twinkle in your chief information officer's eye? Not at all; the omnichannel arms race is on. These capabilities are being turned into competitive advantages by innovative retailers while less-nimble rivals watch market share erode. To quote the science fiction writer William Gibson, "The future is already here … it's just not very evenly distributed."

Andy Lloyd is the general manager of e-commerce products at NetSuite, a provider of integrated web-based business software solutions. Andy can be reached at alloyd@netsuite.com.