Member Article

Avoiding a Black Friday weekend downtime disaster

It’s the time of year retail has been waiting for – Black Friday is finally upon us. The Black Friday to Cyber Monday weekend is arguably one of the biggest shopping events of the year, with total spends expected to reach over £8bn over the weekend this year in the UK alone.

Bargain hunters are on the search for the best deals, but not necessarily rushing to the shops. Online shopping makes the comparison of products in stores increasingly easier, so it’s no surprise that consumers are turning to digital to dig deeper and find the best deals.

But for online retailers, this means a huge influx of traffic to their websites in only a short period of time, putting a lot of pressure on maintaining uptime. For this reason, industry experts have given their advice on what the biggest problems for retailers are this time of year and how to avoid them.

Nigel Tozer, Solutions Marketing Director of EMEA at Commvault, points out that the looming implementation of GDPR shouldn’t be ignored over this busy weekend, advising that retailers should be prepared to deal with an influx of personal data to their websites accordingly.

“The direct connection between Black Friday, or the holiday shopping season in general, and the upcoming implementation of the GDPR might not be immediately apparent, but think for a moment about the amount of Personal Data that each retailer will collect, as shoppers rush to capitalise on big discounts. Addresses, email and credit card information alone will mount up to huge amounts of data, not to mention the task of meeting more stringent levels of consent required for future marketing activity after the GDPR finally kicks-in,” comments Tozer.

He continues, “The retail industry famously prepares early for this season, and with GDPR looming it’s important to factor this into an already busy time of year. Retailers should be ensuring this spike in data collection doesn’t sidestep GDPR preparations – such as work to profile where Personal Data resides, how it’s processed, retained and secured. Many companies are focusing on legal or security aspects of the regulation, and are missing the issue of Personal Data management and how it is impacted by these regulations. Every type of business should be taking a leaf from the ‘seasonal-readiness’ playbook of retail, and looking at these aspects of Personal Data so they are well prepared for next May.”

Bob Davis, CMO at Plutora, explains why retailers should be implementing a solid continuous delivery management plan to reduce the risk of downtime and profit loss over the manic shopping weekend.

“Every year Black Friday and Cyber Monday encourages millions of people to flock to stores to get their hands on the best deals of the season. As more retailers than ever depend on applications and software to support sales both online and in store, they need to be on top of their game to ensure that everything stays up and running, no matter what comes their way,” states Davis.

“Software releases are the single biggest factor contributing to downtime across all industries and if retailers experience a glitch during the shopping frenzy that takes place over this November weekend, the total dollar loss could easily hit seven figures and the reputational damage could increase this number drastically. To significantly decrease the chances of being caught out by a glitch, retailers should implement a solid continuous delivery management plan to be confident that their software and applications will run smoothly no matter the iteration or version.”

Rob Strechay, SVP of products at Zerto, discusses how moving to a cloud environment can significantly increase performance and prevent downtime that could cost retailers tens of thousands of dollars, even on a normal day.

“Avoiding unplanned downtime should always be top of mind for any business, but it’s especially important for retailers as they approach the high-pressure holiday shopping season. Every minute of downtime can equate to tens of thousands of dollars in lost revenue on a normal day. We all know this is much higher during the holiday shopping season. Last year, during the five days after Thanksgiving, some of the biggest names in retail experienced outages due to system overloads from high traffic. Several reports estimate that these outages equated to billions in lost revenue.

These kinds of numbers can make or break a quarter if not an entire brand. Many retailers are overlooking that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure! Cloud must be part of the proactive plan to address this. Successful retailers use the latest advancements in data mobility and orchestration to pre-position workloads to the cloud where they can scale more easily.“

Black Friday is ultimately set to put a lot of pressure on retailers’ websites and applications. Strengthening business IT infrastructures is vital to be able to cope with the increasing demand from deal hungry shoppers, and to ensure that individual retailers don’t lose out to competitors that are better prepared.

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