Retailers Need to Keep Their Networks Up This Holiday Season
Without question, retailers’ busiest days of the year are during the holiday season. Holiday sales in November and December averaged about 19 percent of total retail sales over the last five years. Nevertheless, the increased traffic can be a double-edged sword, overloading networks and causing outages. At the same time, cybercriminals are more active during the holidays, launching DDoS attacks at already strained networks, increasing the risk of downtime.
Should the connections to network infrastructure and edge apps fail, retailers could find themselves unable to process transactions, maintain in-store security, and use digital signage during the most business-critical days of the year.
The Consequences of a Holiday Network Outage
Network outages can wreak havoc on a retailer’s bottom line. An ITIC survey found that a mere one hour of downtime can cost large retailers as much as $5 million. However, the figures are likely much higher on peak shopping days. Beyond the loss of revenue, retailers can also face considerable recovery fees, including a degraded brand reputation. Anxious shoppers will go to competitors to fulfill their holiday needs rather than wait until connectivity gets restored. Worse, they may even leave a scathing review to express their displeasure, potentially causing increased customer turnover.
Not only does network downtime affect customer attitudes toward a brand, but it can also result in employee turnover. Retail employees are already under considerable stress during the craziness of the holiday season. In fact, retail employee turnover during the holidays routinely lands at 60 percent — adding network outages into the mix is a recipe for disaster. Put simply, the holiday season is too important of a time to fail. Retailers must implement strategies that boost network resiliency.
Out-of-Band Management and Failover to Cellular
Out-of-band management and failover to cellular are two network strategies retailers can leverage to make their networks more resilient in the face of holiday challenges. Out-of-band management is invaluable during network outages, providing administrators an alternative path to access devices when the primary network is down. Specifically, it allows administrators to remotely and securely monitor and manage critical devices without disrupting normal operations. Likewise, retailers can combine out-of-band management with failover to cellular to keep their branches open even if their primary network goes down.
Having an out-of-band management system in place also empowers network engineers to restore operations without on-site visits, accelerating the time to recovery. Additionally, best-in-class out-of-band solutions can integrate smoothly with existing IT networks and management systems. By mitigating downtime amid the holiday shopping surge through out-of-band management and failover to cellular, retailers can ensure they don’t miss out on critical revenue opportunities while protecting brand reputation and employee well-being.
Planning for the Holidays and Every Day in Between
Although the high traffic of the holiday season can cause network outages, this is not the only cause of unplanned downtime. Network devices continue to increase in complexity, with software stacks also requiring more frequent updates, exposing them to bugs, exploits and cyberattacks, which can result in outages. Similarly, human error, environmental conditions, and network elements (e.g., ISP carrier issues, fiber cuts, and cable interconnects) are just as likely to create problems.
With these emerging challenges in mind, retailers must adopt strategies like out-of-band management and failover to cellular, preparing themselves not only for the high-stress holidays but also every day in between.
Tracy Collins is vice president of sales, Americas, Opengear, a company that offers network monitoring, data center and IT infrastructure management solutions for secure remote access to all of your critical systems.
