By Jack Sweeney, SevOne
The outages and slowdowns that plagued web sites for retailers like Target, Neiman Marcus, and Victoria’s Secret on and around Cyber Monday were disasters, but customers simply moved on. The experience showed that in today’s connected economy, even slowdowns can cause serious damage for retailers, including lost revenue, tarnished reputations and decreased customer loyalty.
With instant results an expectation, a few brief moments can be all it takes for a consumer to decide to check different deals or to purchase a product from a competing web site that works. By the time retailers were announcing their restored websites and counting their lost revenue last week — on a day when 121 million shoppers were expected to spend $3 billion — all that lingered for consumers were the memories of bad experiences and the beginnings of new relationships. Instead of showing retailers the money, consumers simply showed them the door.
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That’s why the Cyber Monday issues illustrate the urgent need for companies to take an aggressive approach to managing digital infrastructure, ensuring it is capable of scaling to handle demand.
The issue isn’t limited to service outages. Some e-Commerce giants estimate a second’s delay for a web site to load could cost them billions in lost revenue in a year. But online shopping is not all that is at risk. In a hyper-connected, mobile world, we rely on connectivity to run our personal and professional lives — from requesting an Uber to paying bills, booking a flight or even changing the temperature on a smart thermostat — and it’s all dependent on digital infrastructure, the infinitely complex and dynamic environment that makes our connected economy work.
In the case of the consumer buying experience, that infrastructure encompasses a vast spectrum of network, compute, storage and applications — even basic functions such as a facility’s power and cooling. Issues like the ones we saw on Cyber Monday frequently occur when infrastructure is unable to deal with sharp increases in demand.
The outages serve as a compelling reminder that the most substantial imperative for any company delivering an online product or service is to deliver an outstanding experience without slowdowns or outages — all the time, every time. That imperative holds even if there are huge surges like those on Cyber Monday. So what can organizations do?
The key is to put the right digital infrastructure management strategy in place. These massive infrastructures create billions of data points daily. Companies must be able to collect, analyze and take action on this data to make sure they can deliver a great experience that meets customer demands. They need to have full visibility to understand things such as volume and sources of traffic, as well as accurate capacity planning in order to maintain service operations. And in order to do so, they must deploy solutions that are able to collect and analyze massive amounts of data in real time. They also need to understand historical trends, current conditions and future projections that can help them prepare for surges in demand.
But too often digital infrastructure management is considered just an issue for IT or operations teams. Surprisingly, in too few organizations does it rise to the level of attention in the C-suite, despite the fact that revenue, brand equity and customer loyalty depend on the customer experience, which depends in turn on digital infrastructure. Digital infrastructure has become a strategic asset, yet many executives don’t have comprehensive strategies or solutions to manage it.
Digital infrastructure management is as essential to organizations’ success as keeping the lights on in brick-and-mortar stores. As the world becomes increasingly virtual and mobile, it will become more important. It demands an aggressive approach — one that will enable online retailers to scale to meet demand next Cyber Monday, which is certain to surge even higher than it did in 2015.
Jack Sweeney is the CEO of SevOne, a digital infrastructure management company. Prior to joining SevOne, Jack Sweeney served as CEO of six companies, creating $1.3 billion in value. In addition to his role at SevOne, Jack is an Operating Partner for Bain Capital Ventures and provides guidance and strategy as a member of 10 boards of directors, on four of which he serves as chairman.
