Every holiday season demands faster network connectivity and comes with higher customer demands than the year before. Preparing your IT infrastructure for incoming data requests and user activity is the only way to ensure e-commerce success.

What does it mean to be prepared for the busiest part of the year? How can you circumvent threats to your uptime? Let’s look at tips and strategies to help you get the most out of this annual spike in sales.

Preparing for the uptick in web traffic

Holiday shopping in the 2020s no longer involves bursting through shopping mall doors, trampling over aisles, or bartering for deals at checkout. Instead, the National Retail Federation found that shoppers were three times more likely to shop online than in stores in 2021, and those numbers will only increase in the future.

Cyber Week is much more than a casual shopping spike; it’s a significant revenue stream that deserves careful planning. According to Adobe Analytics data, even 2021’s relatively modest post-Thanksgiving Day surge brought in $33.9 billion. Here are five tips to prepare your data center to keep up with consumer demand while reducing cyberattack risks.

1. Check on historical web traffic

To plan for the future, you must first look at your past.

Keeping an eye on the metrics of your business can help you plan for what’s to come and get a sense of which products or services are performing best for your customers. By taking advantage of traffic-management technology, you can learn more about network traffic times, user activity, and available resources at certain times throughout the day.

With these points in mind, networking teams can deploy additional infrastructure to accommodate heavy spikes in traffic or even reroute traffic around outages that would otherwise cause costly downtime.

Further, accurate metrics derived from real-time user activity are essential to making the best data-based decisions for your network.

2. Plan for the worst

You must build your network infrastructure to be resilient against anything unexpected.

Inclement weather can always be a threat, but unexpected power outages are disproportionately costly on the busiest shopping days of the year. Therefore, a backup data center you can rely on and a secondary domain name system (DNS) are imperative.

The secondary data center can ensure business continuity while the primary center recovers. Meanwhile, a secondary DNS ensures your website is always accessible.

3. Ensure optimal uptime

Though often overlooked, power redundancy and management make a world of difference when consumers are buying $12 million worth of products every minute during Cyber Week.

You should prepare to keep operations running no matter the situation. For example, losing power during a shopping surge could be catastrophic for your business and its bottom line. Your primary and secondary data centers must have resiliency features such as UPS and generators to prevent downtime until power is restored.

4. Protect against DDoS attacks

While extreme weather and power outages are real threats, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are the leading causes of business disruptions, affecting even the world’s most prominent name brands at the worst possible moment. To avoid being another one of the statistics, ensure that your cybersecurity strategy involves a backup data center for optimal resilience. Business continuity relies on building redundancies throughout your business practices and IT infrastructure.

Even if you are not the target of the attack, our interconnected economy means that your infrastructure could be collateral damage if another business is hit, such as a cloud provider. As such, your business continuity plan should include entirely discrete IT and network infrastructure in a colocation data center you can physically access when required. When distance or weather prevents direct access, your colocation provider should provide a reliable and competent remote hands service to ensure uptime.

5. Implement network automation

From optimal cooling and automated power backup to user activity tracking and infrastructure deployment, network automation can make a massive difference in the success of your business during the busiest shopping season of the year.

You can’t control the weather or how many people enter your website, but you can control what happens if these things do occur. Working with your network data points and security, your dev teams can implement a plan of attack that includes safeguarding your infrastructure and customers. The key to scaling with demand lies within network automation and data center planning.

Sabey Data Centers is your 360-degree data center solution

Holiday season success means meeting your customers’ high expectations. From inventory transparency to sensitive data protection and security, your business must deliver no matter what. That means planning for every possible disruption that is thrown your way.

Sabey Data Centers has the answers you’ve been looking for, with over two decades of experience and locations across the country. Our Seattle and central Washington locations provide excellent performance and resiliency while maintaining low west coast latency. In addition, our new Austin campus will soon be providing secure and efficient access to central locations. Finally, our Ashburn and Manhattan data centers keep virtual doors open and customers happy for enterprises on the east coast.

Sabey Data Centers is known for its award-winning uptime, industry-leading efficiency, and high customer satisfaction. To learn more about how to open your own data center powered by Sabey, reach out to us today.