Member Article

Black Friday blues and how to avoid them

Black Friday to Cyber Monday is now commonly considered to be the biggest shopping weekend of the year, with over £1bn spent online on Black Friday alone in the UK - a number that is expected to rise this year.

Though traditionally Black Friday has caused chaos in the shops, each year more consumers are turning to online sales, scouring the Internet to find the best bargains from the comfort of their own homes. With access to more available stock, the ability to shop around and often find better deals for longer, it’s not surprising that more people are opting to shop digitally.

But while retailers might be selling more online, they are also dealing with more online traffic than ever before in a very short space of time, and therefore their websites are under a huge amount of pressure to cope with the avalanche of user traffic. Below, we hear from industry experts who reveal the biggest challenges facing retail companies this year, as well as how to avoid them and the importance of optimising IT infrastructure.

Chris Colotti, Field CTO at Tintri, points out that downtime is one of the biggest issues that online retailers will face, and believes that a multi-cloud strategy is the only way to ensure the threat is minimal.

“As one of the busiest shopping periods of the year, every second counts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Retailers need their applications and services to be running at 100% efficiency 24x7. Downtime and outages must be avoided at all costs. But should an issue occur, retailers need to understand the impact to revenue and reputation. How much downtime can each application afford before it impacts the bottom line or seriously impacts customers? The agility and flexibility of the cloud model is attractive, but you cannot afford to ignore time-to-recovery as a key metric in your IT strategy. To avoid downtime and outages, retailers need to be able to scale quickly, plan out their capacity, and underpin this with a multi cloud strategy – this will ensure continuous uptime.”

Jon Lucas, Director at Hyve Managed Hosting, agrees that downtime is the biggest challenge, and insists hosting providers play an incredibly important role.

“So you’ve got in your new stock, you’ve worked out your discounted pricing, your loss leaders, you’ve bought a massive ad campaign and you’re set for Black Friday. But, what about your hosting? If your website can’t cope with the influx of traffic, all that effort and money is wasted. You need to have a scalable solution that copes with traffic spikes with ease. You need to have redundancy in case one of your drives fails. You need to make sure that ‘worrying about your hosting’ isn’t on your to-do list this Black Friday.”

The Senior Business Development Director at Six Degrees, Philip Barden, discusses the importance of strong IT teams at these times of year – both internally, and outsourced – when systems are put under immense strain.

“As with most other industries, retail has been completely revolutionised by technology, and online shopping records are being broken year-on-year. Customers no longer want to leave the comfort and convenience of their own homes to get the best deals, so retailers are going to them instead. This shift in focus to online shopping puts additional pressure on IT departments to provide reliable, secure platforms and infrastructure to support business goals, and this is greatly magnified during the holiday shopping season that kicks off with Black Friday. In a recent survey, conducted by Martec International, more than 90% of retailers stated that loss of sales or inability to trade are the biggest business risks in the event of critical application failure.

“Retailers can minimise the risk of this impacting their year ending sales by leaning on managed service providers to deliver the flexibility, scalability and agility that online sales platforms require to manage sudden bursts of activity. A service provider can also be on hand to provide expert support to prevent downtime or glitches from impacting business revenues, which could prove to be crippling during the busiest time of the year.”

Scale Computing’s co-founder Jason Collier argues that implementing virtualised systems is the most effective course of action for maximising performance.

“As retailers ramp up their staffs and inventories for the holiday shopping season and Black Friday, they must focus on bolstering their IT infrastructures as well. The distributed nature of retail companies means the individual stores have minimal or no IT staff, but often the same IT needs as the central office. By deploying flexible virtualised systems such as hyperconverged infrastructures at the edge, retailers can quickly scale capacity and computing power at its stores while allowing their home office IT team to remotely manage them through a simple web interface. Borrowing from the immortal words of Spinal Tap’s Nigel Tifnel, hyperconvergence allows retailers to turn it to 11 when they need it to be one louder. This means store employees can handle the Black Friday onslaught without worrying about costly downtime or troubleshooting IT issues.”

It is evident that as the Black Friday sales period continues to expand year on year, the strain retail websites and applications are under will follow suit – that is, unless IT infrastructure is strengthened to cope with the increasing demand. While surges in online sales will continue to bring in more profits for the retail industry, individual retailers need to be able to manage this influx of traffic or they risk losing out to those better prepared.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Technology Experts .