Online retailers cautioned outrage

With Christmas and New Year around the corner, consumers will flock online to grab the best deals. During rush hours, the chances of retailers’ online facility facing outages are quite high.

Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Veeam Software, says that with a surge in online orders in the run-up to Xmas and New Year, “availability” is critical for retailers. Being able to quickly back up and restore data should an outage occur is critical to helping ensure customer satisfaction during one of the busiest retail times of the year. Downtime could have a damaging effect on revenue and repeat business.

For many retailers everything ties back to the data centre including the point of sale and website, so if an incident does occur then it is multiplied because of the rush associated with this buying pattern, he said.

To reduce the risk and reap the benefits of Christmas and New Year rush, retailers should leverage the data they have to determine a number of factors such as how many transactions can be made in one day to ensure the back-end infrastructure can handle the surge. 

The online stores should have high-speed recovery, recovering services in 15 minutes or less; data loss avoidance, with backups made at least every 15 minutes; verified protection, meaning failing to recover backups will no longer be an issue; leveraging backups to provide a production-like test environment, so that any potential issues are spotted, according to Petersen. 

 The final capability is to have complete visibility, which is absolutely critical to know how the data centre is operating during this busy time as workloads like these days are not the norm.