Black Friday is in the books. Did your IT systems keep up?
Black Friday weekend is over. If you’re either an online or bricks and mortar retailer, then congratulations – you made it!
We at Pythian hope you crushed your online sales targets these last few days with the help of your IT and data systems. By now you’re no doubt well acquainted with the intense increase in demand and burst of traffic that comes with peak shopping season, but we realize it’s not easy keeping up when
every year
seems to see new records set for consumer spending around U.S. Thanksgiving weekend.
This year’s shopping turnout was another high water mark. The National Retail Association says a
record
189.6 million shoppers did their thing either online or in-store from Black Friday through Cyber Monday, a 14 percent year-over-year increase. Amazon says this past Cyber Monday was the
busiest day
in the company’s history. And according to
Adobe
, it was the biggest day in online shopping history, period, with an estimated $9.4 billion spent online on Cyber Monday alone. That’s a 19 percent increase from last year.
All these big numbers are tantalizing for online retailers, but also mean your system needs the flexibility of a gymnast to be able to quickly scale at the pace required. It’s a lesson that some retailers, unfortunately, had to learn the
hard way
this year.
If your systems kept up without breaking a sweat, then congratulations once again – it means you’ve passed the first big test of the season! If not, there are ways to make the most out of all that extra traffic without dealing with panic-inducing, profit-eating disruptions. Here are two of the most effective ways to get your data estate up to speed:
- Optimize and modernize your current on-premises system. Whether it’s underpinned by Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, Apache Hadoop, MongoDB or other technologies, a good consultant or managed services provider has the strategic and practical expertise required to provide operational improvements, configuration management, performance tuning and other services. The catch? Because it’s on-prem, you may need to spend CapEx to get your system up to speed.
- Migrate your on-premises data estate to the cloud. Cloud platforms like Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure are inherently easy to scale – in both storage and compute capacity – both up and down as required, without having to invest in extra capacity that you may only need sporadically. Cloud platforms are also very cost effective because you pay only for the storage and compute that you use, while not requiring you to invest in extra hardware or data center costs.
