Happy Holidays and welcome to the season of giving! The official start of the holiday buying season is upon us as retailers start and sustain their frenzied rush to get their products out the door and into the hands of the consumer.
In the past, this is where many online and brick and mortar retailers stumbled and realized just how much an outage event of hours, days, and even minutes can have a profoundly negative effect on their bottom line well into the following year. Being prepared and building a highly available contingency plan is a great way to overcome and be successful during the holiday season.
Most call the “official” kickoff of this season to be the much-hyped Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping days that fall right after the Thanksgiving holiday, when it is now starting weeks before. With all that activity going on, in the stores and online, even the smallest disaster could cost the business thousands, if not millions, of dollars in lost sales, not to mention the damage to their branding and reputation.
So, when we talk about a possible disaster, what could that include? History has shown that online retailers suffered from overloaded websites, scalability issues, security issues and breaches, and even DNS attacks during their most profitable times in the season. Physical stores added cash register outages and backend computer system (on-premises and in the cloud) failures as well. Some statistics point to more than 40% of online buyers will abandon a retail site if it takes longer than three seconds to load a page. For customers that are dissatisfied with their online shopping experience, more than 80% of them will not buy from the same site again.
To proactively counter these, you need to come up with a plan for resiliency and contingency for your critical points of possible disaster to ensure a smooth customer experience and keep moving your profits higher.
In a nutshell, these ae some of the essential check-off items to include in your holiday resiliency plan:
And finally, after having a successful and profitable holiday season, make sure you plan for a celebration with your associates and customers, and also a well-deserved vacation!
Happy Holidays from Zerto!
– Mike Nelson has been an IT professional for over 3 decades and has earned a few community awards including a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft Azure Advisor, Citrix CTP, and VMware vExpert. He joined Zerto in 2017 as a Cloud Architect for the US Midwest region and loves to talk to Partners, Providers, and Customers about ZVR, the Cloud, and technologies that shape our lives.