3 Tips For Staying Resilient During The Holiday Shopping Surge
By Kris Beevers, co-founder and CEO, NS1
As we enter peak holiday shopping time, retailers and brands are depending more than ever on their digital resources to capture consumer spend. Many top brands have already begun “Black Friday” deals, forcing others to follow suit and generating a steady flow of purchasing. As such, retailers must act quickly to ensure their e-commerce web and mobile applications are always ready for business.
NS1 retail customers have seen a significant increase in web and application traffic — 24 percent since mid-August. And according to Deloitte’s annual holiday retail forecast, e-commerce holiday sales are expected to generate between $182 billion and $196 billion this season. This represents tens of billions of dollars more in sales versus 2019. Forrester reports online retail growing 18.5 percent this year with in-store foot traffic decreasing, particularly in such categories like health and beauty, consumer electronics, and fashion.
Given the stress people are feeling, the last thing they will tolerate is a subpar online shopping experience, where even seconds of waiting for a site to load or complete a transaction is too long. So, how can retailers and brands optimize their e-commerce capabilities to keep sales healthy and consumers coming back? Here are three ways:
Diversify Infrastructure For Peak Web And Application Performance
To ensure business continuity, retailers need redundant resources to reduce latency and eliminate single points of failure. Automated failover systems can ensure minimal impact to users if problems arise. In addition to availability, web and application performance are crucial for e-commerce. Brands need to diversify their infrastructure to support spikes and higher sustained application traffic. Leveraging multi-could and multi-CDN architecture provides the flexibility for retailers’ systems to auto-scale in response to demand so that performance is not impacted by any unexpected surges.
A key method for optimizing diverse infrastructure is to implement intelligent traffic management to dynamically distribute workloads based on real-time conditions. This ensures traffic is routed to optimal endpoints, ensuring continuous, uninterrupted connections throughout a purchase transaction, improving response times, and making websites and applications more resilient.
It is also important to apply stress or “chaos” into systems in production to reveal system weaknesses and enable engineering teams to better predict and proactively mitigate problems before they present a significant business impact.
Block Malicious Activity To Preserve Brand Reputation And Revenue
With the rise in e-commerce and cloud computing, it’s no surprise that retail will be one of the top 10 most attacked industries, according to Cybersecurity Ventures. In addition to ransomware, these intrusions come in the form of denial of service, domain thefts, or hijacking attacks that reroute website visitors to bogus sites. DNS is one of the most important means to enable application delivery and route internet traffic, making it an appealing target for cyberattacks. Retailers should enable Domain Name Security Extensions (DNSSEC) to protect the integrity of DNS information by ensuring DNS responses are legitimate and customers do not experience the kinds of attacks that reroute them to fraudulent websites. Implementing redundancy at the DNS layer also helps to mitigate the impact of DDoS attacks by eliminating DNS as a single point of failure. IT teams should also take this opportunity to assess their usage of cybersecurity best practices, such as two-factor authentication, strong passwords, and a limit to controls/access to DNS settings.
It is important to note that, while an attractive target, DNS provides insight into systems that make it a valuable tool for identifying and mitigating cybersecurity attacks. Integrating DNS with monitoring and reporting systems gives retail IT teams invaluable visibility into application and network traffic to observe DNS configuration changes and shifting traffic patterns that can reveal nefarious activity so that security teams can respond more quickly.
Ensure A Unified Application Experience Across A Growing Number Of Network Touchpoints
Consumers are making purchases across various devices (i.e., desktop and mobile devices). To enable that access, the network infrastructure is often dispersed across private data centers, public clouds, and edge networks. To link all these devices and access points seamlessly, companies need to ensure their foundational infrastructure components, such as DNS and IP address management solutions, integrate with modern application deployment tools, load balancers, monitoring tools, and different clouds and data centers to route users efficiently to the best endpoint. This allows retailers to provide users with a seamless experience no matter what device they’re using or where they’re located.
The COVID-19 pandemic has created a heightened urgency for e-commerce sales, which is testing retailers’ online strategies. IT leaders are working diligently to ensure a smooth and secure online experience for consumers. Adding to this, the holidays are upon us, making it even more critical for brands to deliver on their promise over the coming weeks and beyond.
About The Author
As Co-founder and CEO, Kris Beevers leads NS1’s team of industry experts as they create products to enable companies to use DNS to build and deliver dynamic, distributed, and automated applications that delight users. Kris is a recognized authority on DNS and global application delivery, and speaks and writes about building and deploying high performance, at scale, globally distributed internet infrastructure. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from RPI, and prior to founding and leading NS1, he built CDN, cloud, bare metal, and other infrastructure products at Voxel, which sold to Internap (NASDAQ: INAP) in 2011.