How to make sure your business is available this Sales Season

The increasing number of online sales by top Indian retailers provides consumers with great deals and discounts. With these increases in sales come peak internet traffic loads for e-commerce websites and apps. This year is no different with experts predicting further rises. How can you ensure your online business remains available and you don’t miss out?

In recent years traffic loads of up to twenty times greater than normal have been seen by Indian e-commerce sites. Unlike Black Friday and Cyber Monday in other countries, the sale season lasts several days, so sustained availability is key.

Consumers demand ‘always on’ availability

Over the past two years, the e-commerce sector has seen significant growth in India, driven by rapid technology adoption led by increasingly popular consumer devices such as smartphones and tablets, coupled with improved broadband access and 4G network. Furthermore eBay and Amazon have intensified competition for Indian companies, which in turn meant providing seamless online transactions were a must to challenge these international e-commerce behemoths.

In addition to the user experience, greater emphasis has been placed on downtime by e-commerce businesses. Failure to manage the extra load during the online sales day has severe repercussions that last well beyond Diwali.

According to the 2016 Veeam Availability Report, application downtime cost enterprises $16 million each year in loss of revenue and productivity. However money is not all that is at stake; the data loss and downtime can cause massive employee productivity issues, customer experience problems, damage to your reputation and concerns from the stock market affecting company valuation.

Consumers now expect high performance and speed from your website or app. It is therefore important to meet this expectation. That sounds obvious, but every year there are brands that fail to do this; their websites crash or they have slow load times and miss out on sales. Don’t let it be your business this year.

Technology the enabler?

According to Morgan Stanley, the e-commerce sales in India is expected to reach nearly $120 billion by 2020. How do e-commerce players tap this growth opportunity? With India on the cusp of digital revolution, technology is expected to play the role of the catalyst facilitating this. However, the real challenge for IT professionals is how to manage modern digital business requirements with out-of-date legacy technology.

I’ve noticed that e-commerce players all have their own specific challenges that mean they pretty much need access to everything always, however the current backup and replication standards they have mean that they then settle for a low performing, legacy backup solution. More often than not, it can’t keep up with this newly built infrastructure of the modern data center.

In a recent survey, 82 percent of CIOs say that there is a gap between the level of availability they can provide now and what end-users demand in order to provide an always-on business. Thus, planning for restoring data, in the fastest and efficient way possible, is essential if businesses are to avoid unnecessary downtime and loss of revenue.

Ensuring you’re ready…

Ahead of these sale days, I recommend online retailers take the following factors into consideration to guarantee availability, minimise downtime, and avoid missing out on the sizeable sales opportunity ahead. You might think you have what you need, but only when things go wrong do you really know.

Capacity Planning – In order to determine what potential peak loads are for your site servers, remove the guess work by reviewing previous figures using monitoring data and plan for a significant uptick beyond that you’ve seen before.

Real-time monitoring – Preparing yourself in advance is obvious, but do you have a simple way of being alerted to issues in your backup and virtual environments when it matters? Are you confident you can avoid downtime and meet your Service Level Agreements (SLA)? Not only does this speed up troubleshooting of issues, and diagnosis of root causes, it can enable your team to manage a potential issues before it materialises into an actual problem.

Test and Test again – Sure you’ve got a backup schedule, but that’s just not enough. You need to ask some serious questions. For example, how long does it take to recover the backup? Do you have the ability to restore a certain file or is it the whole system? How often do you test those backups to ensure they work and can be used as a point of rebuild? How many of your backups would fail? Less than 6 percent of backups are tested each quarter, and more than 16 percent of backups fail to recover.

Making data available 24/7 for 365 days a year is imperative if you wish to drive a competitive edge and survive the digital disruption that is changing the business landscape. Word spreads faster now than ever before courtesy of social media, where your customers and competitors are always-on and well connected.

If last year was a success, don’t take it for granted that 2016 will be fine too. If you can’t re-establish your website or app within 15 minutes, you need to seriously re-evaluate your systems. Start by asking yourself, ‘what will be the next steps I take towards availability for our website or app?’

The availability gap is the hidden true cost of your data centre, and ultimately your online business. Don’t let it stop your business from seizing the opportunity during this sale season.

Ashok Acharya
Regional Director
India and SAARC Region, Veeam Software