Is the IT in your business geared up for the peak season of website visitors?

It goes without saying but only last year many of us were all too aware of significant issues on websites around seasonal demand such as Easter, Christmas and many more which hit online retailers in terms of lost sales and revenue in particular. 

In our latest blog article, we will take you through the importance of making sure that you avoid the mistakes of last year by making sure that your IT team are fully prepared for significant surges in traffic across the website. 

Under cooked infrastructure 

Despite the fact that not all businesses need influencers to drive surges in traffic, websites inaccessible or slow running during peak season because of the under cooked IT infrastructure are not one-off events. 

The impact that the above could have could be extremely costly. People abandoning their purchases, losing revenues, more customer complaints and perhaps even worse could be more hurtful in the long term because of consumers not trusting the brand. 

Therefore, to help avoid the same issues repeating themselves, we are advising that businesses big or small, B2B or B2C undergo health checks on their overall IT infrastructure so they can gear up their capacities before seasonal trends hit rather than having to stress out by trying to get this completed at the last minute. 

To break this down further, it is best to assess your business readiness for the peak season by getting your IT team to ask themselves the following questions under the following headings: 

• Scalability – Is your current platform able to easily scale up and down when required? Can you add extra resources at the drop of a hat? 
• Application load balancing – Does your business have app load balancing in place? 
• Acceptable downtime – Can you establish what the ideal downtime would be if it happened? 
• Automated deployment of virtual machines – Are you able to construct your infrastructure through the use of code? Are you able to spin up new virtual machines instantly? 
• Capacity load – Are you underusing or overusing your capacity at the moment? 
• Security – Have you got the very best cyber security measures in place? Is your business Cyber Security Certified? Are you using leading antivirus software?  

Don’t go paying more than you should be 

Ironically, we find that many businesses upscaling their IT resources to handle the highest possible levels of traffic, it can often mean that some businesses end up spending more than they should be. 

Pardon me for getting overzealous with an example of this! Let’s say that Waitrose only had to pay for overheads during the opening hours of the store only. If it could then limit the resources, it needs when it is closed then it could easily save a small fortune.  

This is exactly what you are able to achieve with a modern cloud platform like Azure. You can easily set up your capacity or virtual machines tailored specifically to your requirements during the so called out of season demand then when you start heading into the peak season, you can scale up quickly and efficiently. So, essentially you only pay for what you use at that particular point in time rather than being at full capacity all the time when it is unnecessary. 

Don’t waste time, get prepared now! 

The above can only be achieved if you are operating in the Cloud. This can be much more troublesome if you have a dedicated server in place on prem and it's never a wise choice to move platforms just before the peak season starts. Therefore, if you are looking to get your business into the Cloud with Advantage then please give our team of Cloud experts a call today. 

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