During the holidays, businesses can face a range of operational challenges, from surges in traffic and reduced staffing to escalating threats of cyberattacks.
This resulted in cloud computing Because it can quickly scale resources, handle significant traffic spikes, and ensure uninterrupted service; importantly because Research entrust Hyve Hosting highlighted that one in three (33%) UK consumers will abandon an unresponsive website within 30 seconds.
Adam Gogarty, director and head of cloud strategy at Deloitte UK, said this reliance has increased in recent years, especially among video on demand services and telecoms providers.
“Especially when people across the country sit down to watch their favorite family Christmas movies,” Gogarty added.
Main challenges
Maintaining normal operations during the holidays is crucial for businesses, and there may be certain challenges they have to overcome. Reduced staffing due to holiday schedules is one of the most obvious reasons, as are poor resource management and insufficient capacity planning.
For example, converting legacy applications to run on the cloud without adopting a cloud-native architecture may present additional issues because they typically do not have the same elasticity. However, it’s equally important to understand the complete supply chain during the holiday rush.
“If retailers want to guarantee delivery before Christmas, systems will need to take into account the physical aspects of business operations, not just the digital aspects, such as warehouse capacity and the ability to pack and ship goods,” said Maynard Williams, managing director at consulting firm Accenture. explained.
“Enterprises need to understand how different solutions interact and how to handle failures, especially at their boundaries. Failures often lie not with digital cloud-native solutions, but with their interfaces to warehousing solutions.
Security is also often overlooked as businesses focus on high demand or downtime, which can put organizations at higher risk. This is because there is a common belief that threat actors always increase during the holidays because they think organizations will be caught slightly off guard.
Be prepared
To ensure uptime during the holidays, best practices should include conducting pre-holiday stress testing to identify system vulnerabilities and configure automatic scaling to handle demand surges. Experts also recommend simulating faults in the following ways chaos engineering Expose weaknesses.
Redundancy across regions or availability zones is critical, as well as having a well-documented incident response plan (with clear upgrade paths) “as this allows the team to resolve issues quickly even with reduced staff,” UKI Software Technology Lead VimalRaj Sampathkumar means corporate management engine.
Luan Hughes says it’s all about understanding the business needs and what your needs look like, Chief Information Officer (CIO) Technology provider Telent, as this will vary by industry.
“When we talk about preparedness, we talk a lot about critical incident management and what happens when a major incident occurs, but I think you need to understand what the triggers are,” she said.
“This means that, as a technical function, you are driving action. Be clear about your tolerance levels and realize when you need to mobilize people to take action, and take action before the situation becomes a serious incident. That way, when you return from vacation time, you won’t cause trouble for yourself.
It’s also important to keep an eye on your employees and your systems, she adds, noting that it’s important to understand your management processes, off-duty hours and duty rotas, and how to provide support if issues arise.
Take advantage of available technology
In addition to a robust strategy, many different technology solutions support cloud reliability during high-stress times, including multi-cloud and Serverless computing.
AI Automation and automation are two key areas that support uptime management by supporting dynamic resource expansion to respond to demand and predict hardware and software failures.
For example, self-healing systems powered by automation can detect and fix common problems without human intervention, reducing the impact of staffing shortages and speeding problem resolution.
While technology has many benefits when it comes to ensuring uptime in the cloud, Hughes advises that having such solutions doesn’t mean teams can rest on their laurels.
“You have to make sure you have some manual intervention — it’s all about understanding what the risks are, allowing automation to do the work, but still making sure your people are checking in in the background.”
In addition, Sid Nag, vice president of cloud, edge and artificial intelligence infrastructure technology at analyst firm Gartner, recommends implementing fully or nearly fully automated disaster recovery (DR) to prevent the worst-case scenario from happening. This can be achieved through your own tools or a third party Cloud native Disaster recovery tools.
“This lays the foundation for achieving aggressive recovery time objectives (RTO),” he noted.
Does this approach work for businesses of all sizes?
The core strategies for maintaining cloud uptime during the holidays should be the same regardless of the size of the organization, but SMBs may benefit from taking a slightly different approach.
Since the platform may be more closed, uptime may be easier to manage, but on the other hand, the team managing this effort will be smaller. Therefore, smaller organizations that do not have the scale to build and maintain all functions in-house may benefit from outsourcing critical workloads to Managed Service Provider (MSP) and/or work with cloud providers to provide technical support during peak hours.
In addition, Charlotte Webb, director of operations at Hyve, suggested that choosing a cloud solution that can be customized according to needs or provide automatic expansion capabilities can help small organizations effectively handle traffic fluctuations and ensure stable performance during peak hours.
Keeping the cloud operational during the holidays requires an ongoing cycle of planning, execution and improvement, with a constant focus on financial sustainability and operational resiliency, Gogarty noted.
However, by focusing on being prepared and leveraging the tools available to support this, businesses of any size should be able to weather the peak.