South African e-tailers, now fast embracing the US tradition of Black Friday sales, must step up their stress testing and resiliency to make the most of this revenue opportunity, says Veeam.
A number of South African Web sites went down over Black Friday last week, as enthusiastic shoppers logged on just after midnight to take advantage of special offers. Some were down for up to an hour, while others were intermittently on- and offline. Many frustrated customers turned to social media to complain, and Black Friday mentions surged. Social media agency 25AM tracked over 18 000 mentions of Black Friday among South African social media users this year.
Warren Olivier, Country Manager for Veeam South Africa, says with Black Friday entrenching itself in the South African retail space, local businesses cannot afford their sites to go down during this increasingly popular sale. "Businesses can't afford down time on Web sites, enterprise systems or operational equipment at any time. But this is even more important during a highly-publicised sale. A site going down during an event such as Black Friday stands to suffer reputational damage exacerbated by social media. It also stands to lose customers, who will turn to competitors to buy from them instead. And, if a system goes down and it has not been backed up for some time, retailers stand to lose important transactional or customer data."
"Retailers knew they could expect traffic surges over Black Friday, and yet they still had outages. So they lost potential sales, the opportunity to upsell and cross-sell, and suffered reputational damage and the cost of downtime," he says.
"Avoiding this comes down to stress testing and making sure data is recoverable. Retailers planning big promotions need to ensure resiliency is built in. They need to use benchmarking tools to simulate high transaction volumes, to ensure their servers can cope with expected traffic and more. They also need to look at resilience and ask - if the server goes down, can I recover it again, and to what point can I recover it?
Olivier says recovery time objective (RTO) and recovery point objective (RPO) become crucial at a time when retailers are making sales every few seconds. Veeam combines these in the concept 'recovery time point objective' (RTPO), and considers under 15 minutes a benchmark RTPO. "You have to consider the implications of losing even half an hour of transactional data in a high transaction phase," he says. "In an event like Black Friday, even 30 minutes may be too much to lose."
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