According to research by PWC the vast majority of Black Friday spending will be done online. This means that retailers are under immense pressure to ensure that their IT systems are up to the job. We’ve come up with a checklist of tasks which should be performed over the next five months to make sure you’re ready for the big day:
• Review performance trends from 2017
• Evaluate potential areas of weakness
• Scale beyond expected traffic spikes
• Evaluate your failover strategy
• Perform disaster recovery check
• Perform a configuration check
• Test your availability
• Update statistics
• Resolve pending issues
• Set up a change freeze date
• Ensure you have enough technical expertise on hand
The last point is sometimes overlooked but is arguably one of the most important. Will you have enough hands on deck during those crucial shopping hours should your IT systems experience any problems? When a workload spike hits, you need extra skills on hand as any outages can cause significant issues for the business if an outage occurs and sales are lost. There is a huge amount of research available about how much an IT outage can cost an organisation. Estimates range from £70,000 an hour to over £40 million in a year.
Consultancy on Demand from Triton Consulting allows you to purchase a block of consultancy hours to be used as and when needed. For example, one of our experts could join your team for a day to run through the Black Friday readiness checklist. That same consultant could come back to work with your team over the Black Friday weekend to ensure that things run smoothly.
Find out more about our Black Friday services.