With an increase in holiday online sales, it is important that data centers run smoothly. In an article for CIO, Robert Lemos discusses three important considerations that companies must make in order to keep up with increasing traffic. According to the article, online sales were up 14 percent from the prior year on “Cyber Monday,” while the amount spent per sale was up 38 percent.
In order to have a handle on this growing trend, the article suggests to “do spring cleaning in October.” Rather than wait for December and the holiday traffic spikes to occur, it is suggested that companies take a look a their current content distribution networks and load balancing as indicated by Dan Blum, a principal analyst for the Burton Group. In addition, it is important for companies to look at their staffing plan to ensure the right people who can handle issues are there should a problem arise.
Another important consideration is “playing defense.” With online holiday traffic increasing come attacks including denial-of-service (DoS) attacks and intrusion attempts. To resist these types of attacks Blum states that companies should consider getting distributed denial-of-service mitigation to provide emergency bandwidth that enables resistance from threats.
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS): Attempts to make a computer resource unavailable to its intended users.
The last consideration as stated in the article includes “considering a trip to the cloud.” A best practice as indicated by Georg Hess, CEO of Art of Defence, includes using cloud resources to spin up additional virtual servers to handle a spike in customer traffic.
Follow the discussion on Twitter @ITInfoForum.
.gif)
