Take 3 Steps So Your IT Keeps Up with the Black Friday Rush

It’s that time of year again: consumers begin checking off their shopping lists and businesses push to get their products in front of consumers and out the door at a pace that can make heads spin. We all know it’s coming—the climax of the holiday IT frenzy—Black Friday is almost upon us! Every touch point, from promotional emails to content served up on browsers to retail point-of-sale systems, open up the risk of vulnerability for data and IT systems. This Black Friday make sure that your business has the resilience to face the impending onslaught without a scratch.

The Most Critical Time of the Year

Given the amount of IT traffic businesses get this time of year, keeping your systems in fighting shape is more critical than ever. Here are some big-picture ideas to keep in mind as another Black Friday draws near:

• Prepare your team for battle
  On the most stressful of shopping seasons, making sure your staff and IT vendor partners are equipped and know what to do in different disaster scenarios, even when small issues arise and just managing the influx, is more important than ever for optimal customer service. Give them the plans and tools to deal with potential issues with grace and poise long before they are thrown into the fray. Make sure that your internet provider, your cloud partner, and your IT staff are ready as well. In the event of disaster, making sure everyone prepares for what could happen is paramount.
• Ensure your infrastructure is up to snuff
  Your POS and business applications will never be under more stress than this time of year, so be ready to scale-up for the increase in traffic by storing them on the cloud. With cloud storage, whether private or hybrid cloud, you’ll achieve a cost-effective way to ensure your applications’ availability can always meet demand by auto-scaling based on need and load-balancing across multiple servers. Once you have the right infrastructure in place, make sure to stress test it thoroughly and regularly so you’re confident it can handle even the craziest of shopping days.
• Keep your systems online and resilient
  With sales at their peak, the cost of downtime is also at its highest around Black Friday. Assuring that your process-critical data and applications are able to be recovered as fast as possible, with minimal data gaps, is so important right now. By relying on a solution like Zerto’s Continuous Data Protection, you can recover your systems within seconds if a disaster or outage strikes. Issues will arise when your entire business is pushed to its limit—make sure that it has the resilience to bounce back from even the worst-case scenario.

Last, but most important: make sure you enjoy yourself this Black Friday and beyond! While this season can be stressful, with some thoughtful planning and the right recovery solution in place, you can remove downtime from your list of worries and focus on what counts!

Learn more about how the Zerto IT Resilience Platform™ can keep your business resilient and protect your mission critical data in the face of Black Friday to avoid outages with Continuous Data Protection. Check out our Downtime Calculator to see just how much an outage could cost this holiday season!