8 Tips For Avoiding Costly Outages During The Holiday Season

By Carl Meadows, Senior Director, Cloud Services Product Manager, SunGard Availability Services

The flow of holiday shoppers is picking up dramatically in brick-and-mortar stores and online, and retailers are prepared. One subject, though, dulls their holiday cheer: the possibly of costly outages during this critical shopping season. And while it’s too late to change most of your major IT actions to ward off such disruptions, there are still some tricks in Santa’s IT bag.

Here is some advice and tips for keeping everything up and running smoothly:

1. Keep your web site as light as possible. Get rid of page clutter. Remove any unnecessary digital elements — from animation and rotating content carousels to third-party tags — that can slow your system down and aren’t really needed. Consider using simple icons that users can click on to link to Facebook and other social networks.
2. Be on the alert for cyber attacks. The holiday season serves as a perfect backdrop for denial-of-service attacks from hackers looking to disrupt your business knowing that this is the time of year that such a disruption would be the most damaging to your bottom-line.
3. Avoid discouraging your shoppers. Make sure you know where to direct shopper traffic if you can’t service requests. Contemplate preparing static pages to handle overloads. Certainly don’t allow an error page to appear when a shopper is eager to buy something online.
4. Be especially vigilant. Watch your monitoring instruments, especially your performance and availability measures to detect if load levels and customer response times for online customers are okay.
5. Keep your web site humming. An influx of prospective shoppers online can slow your IT infrastructure at the worst time. Customers are more urgent than ever at holiday time to get their online shopping done quickly. Take any action that will contribute to leaving shoppers happy.
6. Know your providers and vendors. Ensure that if a crisis erupts, you can count that your applications and critical business operations will continue running with minimal disruption. If you use a third party to handle credit transactions, make sure it can handle your needs or has a plan if something goes wrong. In other words, your business continuity plan is critical. You should consider practically any scenario that could occur and prepare a strategy to deal with it.
7. Be sure your IT staff is ready. Make sure a plan is in place regarding who and when staff members are on call and available. They will need to have access to the right tooling if they need to remediate any issues.
8. Think about next year. Do an assessment of your holiday season and analyze all the critical elements of your selling business to determine what can be improved.

It’s actually quite simple. Just like Santa, make your list and check it twice. (And keep checking it!)

Carl Meadows is senior director, Cloud Services Product Manager, at SunGard Availability Services.