As the holiday season approaches, e-commerce sites are expected to see a massive spike in traffic.
According to Martin Walshaw, a senior engineer at application delivery networking technology company F5, mobile and online shopping is set to generate R4.4 billion in 2013 in SA, which means online retailers have their hands full, especially in the run-up to Christmas.
"Consumers are becoming more comfortable using credit cards online; smartphones and connectivity are getting cheaper and more available; and the logistics industry is evolving to better facilitate the delivery of goods," he says.
To deal with this, Walshaw suggests e-commerce platforms embrace "cloudbursting", which allows online retailers using private cloud architecture for their everyday activities to access the public cloud when demand for processing capacity spikes.
"By its very nature, e-commerce moves in seasonal peaks and troughs," says Walshaw, adding that online shoppers tend to be at their least forgiving during this peak season, which makes it evermore important for online retailers to prevent downtime or disruptions to operations.
He notes that cloudbursting allows retailers to capitalise on the flexibility of cloud architecture and payment models and to ensure 100% uptime no matter how busy the site becomes. This approach also means businesses can avoid having to over-invest in capacity that lies unused for most of the year and can maintain control over their core applications and sensitive customer information while achieving improved performance.
While Walshaw suggests that this approach presents many advantages in the long term, he points out that cloudbursting is not necessarily simple to set up, as it requires support from specialised network optimisation and application delivery teams.
"Perhaps the biggest [advantage] of these for online retailers is the peace of mind - knowing it can never become a 'victim of its own success', and become so busy that systems start to crash."
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