With Thanksgiving right around the corner, businesses everywhere are readying themselves for the post-holiday shopping blitz. And with the National Retail Federation predicting that sales will increase by 2.8 percent this holiday season, Cyber Monday promises to be lucrative for retailers that are prepared.
In anticipation of Cyber Monday, online retailers need to assure that tools are in place to minimize downtime when web traffic spikes, and that applications are available as customers make purchases from their mobile devices. In other words, at times where many users continuously use an online business and there is a lot of money at stake - an online shopper’s Quality of Experience (QoE) must not be compromised.
Guaranteeing high QoE translates into several challenges for retailers:
- Ensuring uninterrupted availability
- Providing sufficient capacity to process transaction peaks while delivering fast response time
- Ensuring that services can continuously operate even under attack
Ensuring high QoE and network availability requires both attention to and readjustment of the network infrastructure; which means that it’s vital to monitor and analyze traffic levels during season peaks from previous years. Expected and unexpected traffic surges that cannot be addressed by existing application and network infrastructure are the biggest threat to optimal performance. Not being able to provide the capacity required during seasonal peaks increases the risk of losing shoppers.
Retailers should take the following steps to guarantee high QoE this holiday season:
- Deploy an application delivery controller (ADC) solution, which not only delivers basic load balancing capabilities but also provides several policies for traffic redirection, application acceleration and bandwidth management for matching your expected ‘seasonal peaks’.
- Enable on-demand capacity growth to scale network infrastructure capacity with minimal impact on active services - guaranteeing optimal online business execution.
- Protect your business from a Hacktivist Attack. Check out the Cyber Monday post on our Security Blog to learn more.
Have a question about how to prepare for Cyber Monday? Leave a comment and we’ll be happy to provide an answer.