How to Avoid a Tech Blackout on Black Friday
New shopping “holidays,” including Small Business Saturday and Cyber Monday, have added to the Black Friday craze. That’s why ensuring your IT infrastructure is ready for the holiday onslaught is so important. Experts weigh in on how you can prevent a tech blackout and keep your holidays happy.
November brings turkey eating, pumpkin spice lattes, sweet potato pies, and major retail sales. Black Friday has been a staple of American consumerism since it started in 1924. As technology has evolved, so has the retail holiday season. In fact, Adobe predicts shoppers will spend $240 billion between November 1 and December 31, 2024. Consumers will make nearly half of those transactions on mobile devices.
As the demand to accommodate consumers’ growing use of technology grows, so does the pressure for retailers to maintain consistent uptime. But you can’t control everything, and sometimes downtime is inevitable. Even Apple Pay experienced an outage in December 2023.
As Black Friday and Cyber Monday rapidly approach, eight tech industry leaders provide their advice on how retailers can keep up with the digital demand and avoid downtime and issues:
Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO, Scale Computing
Instead of only sending and storing data in a center located hundreds of miles away that every store on the network relies on, retailers should consider the deployment of an IT solution at the edge. A hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) solution with edge computing capabilities brings a mini data center directly to each store, while still utilizing the larger, off-site data center. It combines high-performance servers and storage into a single, simple to use, onsite data center that isn’t reliant on external networks, so downtime is no longer an issue. This simple, efficient way to manage IT allows retailers to capitalize on the shopping rush,”
Lex Boost, CEO, Harlem Next
This enhanced technology puts more pressure on retailers to ensure they are meeting the three main requirements for a smooth customer experience: speed, reliability and security. And, has made gearing up for peak retail days, such as Black Friday and Cyber Monday, all the more important. Retailers will want to make sure they are working with a comprehensive cloud hosting solution, including hybrid ready product portfolios, iron clad security solutions, core uptime and an extensive network, that addresses industry-specific requirements and can be trusted to ensure they are always open and their customers are always happy.”
Amanda Regnerus, Sr. Partner Sales Manager, Amazon Web Services
Recently, there has been a trend among retailers to turn to outsourcing in an attempt to reduce capital expenses, add capabilities and adopt new technologies in short timeframes. It is actually very common for various retailers to share the same payment system processor, data analytics company or another type of service provider. However, this brings the issue of the service provider’s security; if the provider is hit by a cyberattack, it can have repercussions for all its customers, and cybercriminals are very aware that service providers often require access to their customers’ sensitive data.
During these peak retail days, it is important for retailers to take extra vigilance and implement comprehensive security posture that takes into consideration third-party provider risk. These extra steps include: including all service providers in your company’s risk assessments, asking all vendors to complete an in-depth questionnaire about their security practices, understanding and defining your data access lifecycle and encrypting sensitive data.
Taking the few extra precautions will help to ensure that your holiday activities run efficiently and securely so you and your customers can focus on the joys of the season rather than the risks.”
Bryan Becker, Sr. Director of Product, HUMAN
Before the shopping season truly gets underway, retailers and consumers should be taking proactive steps to safeguard both business and personal data throughout the holidays, and beyond. For retail businesses, that means incorporating security into the development process of their applications, to reduce the number of vulnerabilities in apps, but also to increase the remediation of vulnerabilities that have gone undetected.
For their part, consumers must stay vigilant, and check that the apps and websites they use are encrypted. In addition, consumers can choose payment apps like Apple or Google Pay, Zelle or Venmo, to purchase items. This eliminates the risk of their personal card information being insecurely stored on an unknown vendor’s system.
Using just these few suggestions can help retailers and consumers to prioritize cybersecurity, and reduce the fear of breaches and hacks during the holidays, allowing the true spirit of the holiday season to shine through,”
Steve Moore, Vice President and Chief Security Strategist, Exabeam
Prebuilt security incident timelines can display the full scope and context of related event details. This means that analysts don’t have to comb through massive amounts of raw logs to manually create a timeline as part of any investigation.
As a result, analysts can detect breaches sooner and reduce the amount of time that attackers are ‘dwelling’ in a network environment, significantly reducing the size of a breach and its devastating impacts. With the increasing sophistication and worsening impacts of mega data breaches as the holiday season approaches, now is the time for organizations to implement smarter security management solutions.”
Jeff Keyes, VP Product Marketing, Planview
To prepare, all organizations should incorporate a little chaos into their software delivery pipelines to see how quickly they can react to last minute changes, unpredictable loads, and unexpected failures. Redundancy and resiliency planning in both infrastructure and processes dramatically improve the reliability and help achieve a trustworthy customer computing experience. Invest in chaos engineering to verify your preparedness – the changes you make will impact how you architect and deliver software solutions.”
Steve Blow, EMEA Solutions Engineer, Run:ai
Managing the surge in demand over consumer holidays like Black Friday is easier if retailers have established a multi-cloud environment that ensures the ability to move freely to, from and between any combination of clouds, including Azure, AWS, and the hundreds of smaller local cloud providers available. This will help retailers deal with the mammoth spike in traffic and sales, despite any challenges that third-party cloud suppliers might experience. The risk is spread across multiple platforms, minimizing the possibility of vendor downtime.
The peak holiday season brings a lot of demand, so the ability to be agile with workloads can significantly improve system performance, even in the midst of peak holiday sales season.”
Dave Karow, Sr. Manager, Product/Platform Marketing, Split.io
Feature flags are changing all of that. Since a feature flag lets new code be deployed to staging or production “turned off” and then gradually ramped up or turned off for specific user populations without a new deployment, developers can continue to innovate and even test in production, without impacting customers. Feature flags also make it easier than ever to implement an “ops toggle” where specific features can be turned off during peak traffic. One example would be turning off inventory checks or calls to non-essential third-party systems during the first few hours of a flash sale. Since feature flags are evaluated user-by-user and session-by-session (unlike server or service-level configurations), those ops-toggles could be set to “off” for general users and “on” for premium customers so only the latter subset hits the more computationally intensive options.
When only some users are seeing a feature, and others are not, traditional monitoring fails to deliver an accurate picture. When system health and user behavior are observed through the lens of the feature-flagging system, it becomes trivial to determine which flag states are causing issues and which are leading to the most desirable user behavior. This is why high-scale retailers use feature flags not only as a control mechanism but also to drive their monitoring and experimentation efforts.”
Mihir Shah, Board Member, Other World Computing
As data volumes continue to rise and critical digital information increasingly lives on IT networks, SMBs and individual professionals should view end of year deals as an opportunity to focus on planning for their business’ future success by implementing storage solutions that can keep all of their precious data safe. Your business should not suffer from downtime and seasonal shopping should be used as an opportunity to invest in your business by protecting your data and preparing for the new year.”
Editor’s Note: These expert insights were originally collected and published in November 2019. Job titles and photos have been updated to reflect current positions.
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