Holiday Demand IT Prep. Tips

By staying proactive to guarantee speed, up-time, and security this holiday season, enterprises can ease their top IT concerns in the face of seasonal demand surges.

‘Tis the season

Thanksgiving has passed along with the hype for black Friday and cyber Monday sales, but the holiday season is still going strong. As 2019 comes to an end, enterprise CIOs and CTOs are working hard to stay prepared for the ongoing seasonal surges in demand. We discuss these hot IT holiday prep. tips here, so that you can Live Easy.

Seasonally-affected industries like retail, travel, and hospitality need to be prepared to handle surges in demand that come with the holidays. As outlined by DataStax, some of the top concerns for these industries this year include speed, uptime, and cybersecurity.

Maintain Speed

The ability to instantly adjust database capacity across all on-premises and cloud infrastructure is key to adapting to and providing the speed required for increased online demand. By distributing databases across different platforms, nodes that run on any cloud can be added at any time. This way, enterprises can maintain optimal responsiveness throughout seasonal demand surges.

Guarantee Uptime

With optimal speed ensured, avoiding downtime comes to play. Downtime during the holiday season is costly, especially for those critical issues that can take hours to fix. Business-critical applications, as Intel’s George Clement puts it, rely on solid data center management solutions that provide the power, cooling, space, and network capacities for optimal uptime and availability. Cloud and edge strategies should be monitored closely, but non-invasively to avoid strain on a small edge footprint or excessive requirements on cloud infrastructure.

With today’s soaring IT infrastructure complexity though, enterprises face an increased possibility of database fragmentation leading to more failure points and less redundancy (Schumacher). Collaboration between hybrid cloud, multi-cloud environments, and on-premises infrastructure is key to avoiding disaster. For example, “cloud bursting”, proposed by Microsoft Azure, allows for shifts between private and public clouds to meet surges in demand. Apache and Nginx also continue to be the most popular solutions, running across all environments and allowing seasonally affected industries to route demand surges based on availability. It’s all about securing uptime.

Maximize Security

Database infrastructure that runs over multiple platforms can also increase cybersecurity risks around improper configuration, for instance. (Schumacher). This is especially critical come the holiday season, when retailers make up to 30% of their annual sales, according to the national retail federation. Cybersecurity issues during peak seasons can wreak havoc on the reputation of an enterprise. One way to avoid this is through database standardization on infrastructure that’s multi-model and multi-cloud, covering all workloads – transactional, analytical, search – and formats (Schumacher). This allows enterprises to centrally manage these functions, leaving less room for error and security risks.

Be Proactive. Be Jolly.

A survey of 274 CISOs, CTOs, and CIOs from Nominet’s Cyber Security in the Age of Digital Transformation report revealed the top concerns with digital transformation projects to be cybersecurity risks, at 53%, and rigid technological infrastructure, at 40% (DeNisco Rayome). By staying proactive to guarantee speed, up-time, and security this holiday season, enterprises can ease these concerns and enjoy a happy holiday.

At LeCiiR, we want you to Live Easy. For questions on this topic or any others, don’t hesitate to contact us. In the meantime, we’d like to wish everyone happy holidays, a merry Christmas, and a happy new year! Cheers to an exciting 2020.

References

Alison DeNisco Rayome, Digital Transformation: Top 5 concerns for CIOs. July 2019.

Microsoft Azure, What are public, private and hybrid clouds? 2019.

National Retail Federation, Winter Holiday FAQs.

Robin Schumacher (DataStax), What’s Keeping CIOs up at Night This Holiday Season. October 2019.