Black Friday – surviving the inevitable peaks

IT teams working for large retailers, logistics and fulfilment organisations are under immense pressure in the lead up to Black Friday and Cyber Monday with record numbers of online purchases taking place last year. According to IMRG UK online spending in 2016 reached

• £ 1.23 billion on Black Friday compared to £ 1.1 billion (2015)
• £ 6.45 billion online over the Black Friday through Cyber Monday period (2016)

The reality is that different businesses peak at differing times during the year, it just happens that Black Friday and the ensuing Cyber Monday are attracting the most public attention.

However, for a Holiday Company, their peak is post-Christmas bookings as people seek to shrug off the grey of January and plan a holiday to look forward to. So, peaks are not confined to Black Friday at all! However, peaks tend to happen pretty much at the same time for the same reasons i.e. they have a degree of predictability in the main.

A database outage or reduction in throughput, at any time of the year, can be disastrous for organisations. Avoiding downtime or compromised throughput during a peak period is essential. According to the Ponemon Institute businesses risk losing $ 740,357 (£ 580,000) every hour their website is down; however, the cost of database outages can be measured in many ways:

• Lost sales revenue
• Lost customers
• Reputational damage
• Regulatory and compliance implications
• Internal morale

Whichever way you measure the cost of a database outage there will always be a negative financial effect on the organisation.

Sometimes it is necessary to get an independent, unbiased view of current processes and procedures to ensure that your systems are as stable, secure and efficient as possible.

Triton Consulting is the largest independent DB2 and information management consultancy in the UK and operate globally.  So, what can we do for you?  Our role is to help you enjoy a “seamless peak” i.e. no panic, no over-running jobs, your organisation’s and customers’ expectations fulfilled.

Our Black Friday / Peak service covers three key phases:

Identification

• Conduct pro-active health check to review critical DB2 system settings and assist with identification of potential workload bottlenecks

 Analysis

• Evaluate failover strategy and ensure high availability solution is configured appropriately ready for Black Friday

 Execution

• Provide recommendations to improve database scalability, including potential changes specific for Black Friday workloads only, to ensure database and application availability

All of our consultants are DB2 experts with deep technical knowledge and experience.  This is combined with the ability to work with C-level teams to provide real, quantifiable business results from better managing IT.

Contact us to find out more

• Share