drj logo
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Already have an account? Log in

drj logo

Welcome to DRJ

Already registered user? Please login here

Login Form

Register
Forgot password? Click here to reset

Create new account
(it's completely free). Subscribe

Skip to content
Disaster Recovery Journal
  • EN ESPAÑOL
  • SIGN IN
  • SUBSCRIBE
  • THE JOURNAL
    • Digital Edition
    • Article Submission
    • DRJ Annual Resource Directories
    • Article Archives
    • Career Spotlight
  • EVENTS
    • DRJ Spring 2023
    • DRJ Fall 2023
    • Other Industry Events
    • Schedule & Archive
  • WEBINARS
    • Upcoming Webinars
    • On Demand
  • MENTOR PROGRAM
  • DRJ ACADEMY
    • DRJ Academy
    • Beginner’s Guide to BC
  • RESOURCES
    • New to Business Continuity?
    • White Papers
    • DR Rules and Regs
    • Planning Groups
    • Business Directory
    • Business Resilience Decoded
    • DRJ Glossary of Business Continuity Terms
    • Careers
  • ABOUT
    • Advertise with DRJ
    • Board and Committees
      • Executive Council Members
      • Editorial Advisory Board
      • Career Development Committee
      • Glossary Committee
      • Rules and Regulations Committee
  • Podcast

Eight Tech Industry Leaders Give Tips to Avoid Black Friday Downtime

by Jon Seals | November 18, 2019 | | 0 comments

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are quickly approaching! Retailers have already begun to promote their sales online. Leading up to these peak retail holidays,retailers will be ensuring that they have the technology needed to handle the yearly explosion or online traffic and footfall. Last year, 174 million Americans enjoyed the discounts on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, that’s more than half of the entire country (53%).

Unfortunately, in recent years, we have seen major retailers suffer technical issues during the demanding days. Last year, Walmart’s website went down for several hours during the start of Black Friday, and Macy’s app and website experienced website downtime during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, and were forced to extend the holiday.

Ahead of this year’s peak retails holidays, eight tech industry leaders have provided tips on how retailers can avoid downtime and tech issues during the peak retail holiday season:

Alan Conboy, Office of the CTO, Scale Computing

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are the biggest days for retailers, yet most retailers still use the same technologies they employed a decade ago – Point-of-Sale systems, one or more servers, and some external storage. Other more innovative retailers have digitized their infrastructures with in-store Wi-Fi, security appliances, or in-store digital promotions. Many retailers still collect, send and process data over networks and off-site data centers. The challenge is that if that off-site data center experiences an outage or network failure, this will certainly lead to downtime, ultimately affecting shoppers’ experiences, whether in-store or online.

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,” said Alan Conboy, office of the CTO, Scale Computing.

Lex Boost, CEO, Leaseweb USA

“We are in a new era of retail which has been ushered in by evolving technology blending the physical and digital, and reshaping the consumer buying experience. Robotics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, augmented reality and virtual reality allow retailers to offer enhanced shopping experiences through “fitting rooms” on cell phones, personalized digital displays, customer face recognition, robots and instant payment.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.” said Lex Boost, CEO,Leaseweb USA.

Amanda Regnerus, EVP of Product and Services, US Signal

“Black Friday and Cyber Monday are two of the busiest retail days of the year, bringing with them amazing sales and peak levels of online shopping, app usage and credit card payments. However, these days also bring with them prime times for DDoS attacks, ransomware strikes and other types of cybercrime.

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.” said Amanda Regnerus, EVP of Product and Services,US Signal.

Bryan Becker, Product Manager, WhiteHat Security

“As the U.S. prepares to celebrate Thanksgiving, retailers are preparing stores and websites for an influx of shoppers. Soon, consumers will embark on a frenzied journey to find the best deals on holiday gifts, using an abundance of apps to assist them. However, cybersecurity isn’t always at the top of everyone’s mind – and that means these apps can become ripe for hackers to pick off credit card and other personal information from unsuspecting shoppers.

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,” said Bryan Becker, DAST product manager, WhiteHat Security.

Steve Moore, Chief Security Strategist, Exabeam

“Frequently during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, intrusions are detected by a notable change, such as a rapid increase in network traffic, a suspicious system login location or time, or the unusual export of sensitive information. Machine learning security approaches can make it fast and easy to find anomalous and suspicious user and device behavior. Its algorithms can baseline normal behavior in your network environment, then alert your security team whenever anomalous activity occurs.

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.” Said Steve Moore, Chief Security Strategist, Exabeam.

Jeff Keyes, Director of Product Marketing, Plutora

“Think Black Friday doesn’t apply to you? Being ready for chaos and the unexpected must be part of your agility planning. For many, Black Friday represents unpredictable load on the system combined with late-breaking changes to handle special processing on the deals. Online retailers have learned by sad experience that without proper planning, they’ll miss opportunities only realized during those critical hours.

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.” Said Jeff Keyes, Director of Product Marketing, Plutora.

Steve Blow, Technology Evangelist, Zerto

“Mitigating downtime should be top of mind for every business year-round. However, it’s especially important over the Black Friday weekend and Cyber Monday, because retailers operating online are expected to provide uninterrupted retail options for an ‘always-on’ customer culture. Last year, a record-breaking $7.8 billion worth of sales were made on Cyber Monday and, with a similar volume of shoppers expected this year, retailers must ensure they demonstrate proper cyber-resilience to stay online and fully capitalise on the opportunity.

“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, minimising 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.” Said Steve Blow, Technology Evangelist, Zerto.

Dave Karow, Continuous Delivery Evangelist, Split

“With all the talk of holiday shopping and of Black Friday morphing into “”pre-Black Friday”” sales, you might think this is a busy time of year for developers at online retailers.  In fact, this is the time of year where many of them must sit on their hands and do very little, while they wait out “”code freezes”” and even “”infrastructure freezes”” out of fear that a change introduced now could jeopardize 60% or even 70% of some retailers revenue.

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” said Dave Karow, Continuous Delivery Evangelist, Split.

Related Content

  1. Disaster Recovery Journal
    In the time of crisis … Are You Prepared To Lead?
  2. Disaster Recovery Journal
    Change Change Change
  3. Disaster Recovery Journal
    Safety Security and Loss Prevention During Hospitality Emergencies

Recent Posts

DecisionPoint Systems Launches MobileConductor Express

January 27, 2023

Offerpad to Release Fourth-Quarter and Full-Year 2022 Results on February 22nd

January 27, 2023

Insurtech COVU Leverages OpenAI to Streamline Insurance Agency Operations

January 27, 2023

WoodWing Embeds Workato Product to Meet Growing Customer Demand for Integrations for AI-based Digital Asset Tagging

January 27, 2023

DigitalBridge to Participate in Upcoming Investor and Industry Conferences in February 2023

January 27, 2023

iQor Joins Customer Contact Week 2023

January 27, 2023

Archives

  • January 2023 (1224)
  • December 2022 (1144)
  • November 2022 (1595)
  • October 2022 (1574)
  • September 2022 (1571)
  • August 2022 (1581)
  • July 2022 (1365)
  • June 2022 (1711)
  • May 2022 (1651)
  • April 2022 (1618)
  • March 2022 (1924)
  • February 2022 (1549)
  • January 2022 (1472)
  • December 2021 (1446)
  • November 2021 (1835)
  • October 2021 (1777)
  • September 2021 (1697)
  • August 2021 (1661)
  • July 2021 (1566)
  • June 2021 (1768)
  • May 2021 (1666)
  • April 2021 (1798)
  • March 2021 (1907)
  • February 2021 (1038)
  • January 2021 (554)
  • December 2020 (30)
  • November 2020 (35)
  • October 2020 (48)
  • September 2020 (57)
  • August 2020 (52)
  • July 2020 (40)
  • June 2020 (72)
  • May 2020 (46)
  • April 2020 (59)
  • March 2020 (46)
  • February 2020 (28)
  • January 2020 (36)
  • December 2019 (22)
  • November 2019 (11)
  • October 2019 (36)
  • September 2019 (44)
  • August 2019 (77)
  • July 2019 (117)
  • June 2019 (106)
  • May 2019 (49)
  • April 2019 (47)
  • March 2019 (24)
  • February 2019 (37)
  • January 2019 (12)
  • ARTICLES & NEWS

    • Business Continuity
    • Disaster Recovery
    • Crisis Management & Communications
    • Risk Management
    • Article Archives
    • Industry News

    THE JOURNAL

    • Digital Edition
    • Advertising & Media Kit
    • Submit an Article
    • Career Spotlight

    RESOURCES

    • White Papers
    • Rules & Regulations
    • FAQs
    • Glossary of Terms
    • Industry Groups
    • Business & Resource Directory
    • Business Resilience Decoded
    • Careers

    EVENTS

    • Spring 2023

    WEBINARS

    • Watch Now
    • Upcoming

    CONTACT

    • Article Submission
    • Media Kit
    • Contact Us

    ABOUT DRJ

    Disaster Recovery Journal is the industry’s largest resource for business continuity, disaster recovery, crisis management, and risk management, reaching a global network of more than 138,000 professionals. Offering weekly webinars, the latest industry news, rules and regulations, podcasts, the industry’s only official mentoring program, a quarterly magazine, and two annual live conferences, DRJ is leading the way to keep professionals up-to-date and connected in an ever-changing world.

    LEARN MORE

    TWITTER

    Disaster Recovery Journal is the leading publication/event covering business continuity/disaster recovery.

    Follow us for daily updates @drjournal

    Newsletter

    The Journal, right in your inbox.

    Be informed and stay connected by getting the latest in news, events, webinars and whitepapers on Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

    Subscribe Now
    Copyright 2023 Disater Recovery Journal
    • Terms of Use
    • Privacy Policy