With a little over a week to go before Christmas Day, consumers will now start to panic buy as they rush in-store to purchase their last minute Christmas gifts, and with more retailers starting their online sales on Christmas Eve, consumers will flock online to grab the best deals. Advanced sales has proved to be a success for retailers if they have the right processes and contingencies in place.
Gregg Petersen, Regional Director, Middle East and SAARC at Veeam® Software says that with a surge in online orders in the run up to Xmas, “availability” is critical for retailers in UAE, and being able to quickly backup and restore data should an outage occur is critical to helping ensure customer satisfaction during one of the busiest retail times of the year.
The run up to Christmas Day illustrates the importance of the data centre and availability for retailers. Downtime could have a damaging effect on revenue and repeat business.
For many retailers everything ties back to the data centre including the point of sale and website, so if an incident does occur then it is multiplied because of the rush associated to this buying pattern.
To reduce the risk and reap the benefits of Christmas rush, retailers should leverage the data they have to determine a number of factors such as how many transactions can be made in one day to ensure the back-end infrastructure can handle the surge.
For the Always-On retailer to work during this busy shopping period, they should consider implementing an availability solution that offers five key capabilities. These are: high-speed recovery, recovering services in 15 minutes or less; data loss avoidance, with backups made at least every 15 minutes; verified protection, meaning failing to recover backups will no longer be an issue; leveraging backups to provide a production-like test environment, so that any potential issues are spotted. Implementing these capabilities would mean real savings and more improved revenue opportunities.
The final capability is to have complete visibility, which is absolutely critical to know how the data centre is operating during this busy time; as workloads like these days are not the norm.