Johannesburg, 27 Oct 2021
How will Black Friday impact your organisation? With the coronavirus pandemic, the digitalisation of everyday life saw over two billion people shopping online in 2020 and global retail sales growing more than 25%. While Black Friday in South Africa has seen year-on-year growth, both financial institutions and retailers need to ensure their systems don’t get disrupted during this critical period. One way to do this is with load testing: “While banks do a lot of performance valuation and testing online, the biggest issues they have are with their backend systems – making those transactions come through,” says Jacques Vermeulen, senior presales solutions consultant at Micro Focus. It’s not only about tracking positive transactions, but testing for passes and failures within the system. “If all of it goes down and as transactions are boosted, it will become difficult to recover the revenue,” he adds.
With so much focus on micro services and APIs, many backend systems are far from the traditional web applications they once were. Transactions, for example, need to go through switching agents to ensure they don’t get lost. “If you lose a transaction, it’s gone,” says Vermeulen. “A lot of money can be lost during one or two hours of downtime.”
While banking institutions experience a 30%-40% increase on transaction loads during Black Friday, they’re far from the only industry with a backend that takes strain. During the pandemic, retailers were impacted by an increase in transactions, which helped accelerate digital transformation but also highlighted system issues (especially when it came to online shopping).
“If your systems are not up to it, you could be in trouble… the biggest challenge is not necessarily the systems but for the backend to get the delivery slots sorted. It’s not a system problem but a whole chain of events that need to happen to get the product to the end-user,” says Vermeulen. For this reason, planning and scheduling is critical from both a functional and performance perspective. Retail apps are not only important for customers, but for everyone who makes up the supply chain looking to increase their revenue on a yearly basis.
“With the advent of DevOps and COVID-19, there’s been an increased pressure that’s not only good for the application development team, but the deployment team as well,” explains Seph Robbertse, Micro Focus’s Application Security Sales Specialist. “Often, people start taking shortcuts where possible, but user experience and performance are non-negotiables.”
Quicker-to-deploy mobile applications pose a security risk. “There's at least one exploitable serious vulnerability in a retail application,” warns Robbertse. “Be it mobile or web, they still have some serious security vulnerabilities open not just during Black Friday but throughout the year. Security is often overlooked in order to get these apps out faster.”
Looking at brick-and-mortar, retailers, in particular, need to ensure their backend systems are accurate and this requires proper testing – load and functional quality assurance. Another option is service virtualisation technology – a digital twin – that uses software to mimic different inputs into a payment gateway without actually performing a test.
“Pick n Pay, as an example, would make use of service virtualisation technology because they have around 45 different endpoints and external services that they need to test every time there’s a system change,” explains Vermeulen. Service virtualisation technology solves the problem of a retailer waiting for a slot to test their systems. “It works from a functional, performance and security point of view.”
Providing a more secure online experience is more important than ever before. Global security breaches within the retail industry means monetary and reputational loss in the millions.
“Retailers now have the opportunity to do right by their customers… by providing a much more secure online shopping experience,” says Robbertse. “These organisations also depend on their applications to promote their business. The reason security always gets left out of this process is because of the pushback from the developers because of the amount of false positives picked up.”
Robbertse adds that implementing machine learning can achieve a 95% reduction in false positives. Using technology like automation will help retailers to get their customer-facing applications ready for Black Friday, whether they’re running on mobile or via an online shopping portal. “It’s not just for Black Friday and not just for retailers. How do we make sure that there are no interruptions during these critical – and everyday – times?” asks Vermeulen. “Retailers need to realise that it’s not a once-off anymore.”
Running regular performance testing gears up a company to become more agile. “You cannot just do load testing because it is Black Friday. It needs to be part of a process. To deploy with confidence, you need to have the life cycle in place,” he ends.
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