Seasonal shopping days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, while great for consumers, can be manically stressful for IT teams, who are tasked with keeping IT systems running smoothly and securely despite sometimes unprecedented surges in traffic. Any downtime on Black Friday could cost a retail business huge amounts, and lead to disgruntled customers.

To help IT teams prepare for seasonal shopping days, six IT experts give their tips for maintaining availability:

Gary Watson, CTO of StorCentric and Founder of Nexsan, highlights the importance of IT resilience. He said: “Seasonal shopping days such as Black Friday test the peak capacity of IT resources, often to breaking point. With many retailers expecting to see a rise in profits – and more customers coming through the door, either physically or digitally – everything right down to the fulfilment is tested. With this in mind, it’s important to ensure any IT environment can meet the retailer’s needs and isn’t being stretched beyond its limits. This also means testing the elasticity and capacity demands and ensuring there are adequate cost control measures in place when it comes to scalability.”

Echoing his sentiments, Jon Lucas, director, Hyve Managed Hosting said: “With a massive £1.4bn spent in online sales in the UK last Black Friday, the stage is definitely set for the biggest shopping date of the year. Floods of consumers wait in anticipation to get the best deals, and in turn bombard websites with traffic. The question is, is your hosting ready? All the discounted pricing, online advertising, and most importantly your merchandise, will be a waste if your website fails to cope with spikes and influxes. After all, over a third of UK shoppers say a non-functioning website immediately damages their opinion of a brand, causing perceptions of an ‘unprofessional’ and ‘poorly managed’ business. Make sure you have a scalable solution in place that can run tests on your website beforehand, adjust resources as and when needed and easily manage bursts of activity to provide a reliable, secure platform when you need it most.”

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https://www.continuitycentral.com/index.php/news/technology/3490-seasonal-shopping-days-advice-for-retailers-on-avoiding-damaging-downtime