Cyber Monday was here and with it came wave after wave of online shoppers eager to get a head start on holiday shopping, along with a wave of sales pitches from performance management vendors eager to sell their products to businesses worried about the performance impact of a surge in online shopping.
Typically these product pitches have two different targets. One is the online retailers themselves, who need to have done enough testing and infrastructure improvements to ensure that their sites (and sales) don’t fall when all of those cyber shoppers come a clickin.
And the other target is corporate network managers and IT directors, who fear that employees will be wasting time and network bandwidth while they search for the right presents using the company network.
Whether you believe that Cyber Monday is a legitimate online occurrence or a trumped up pseudo-event designed to nudge online sales, there is little doubt that a large portion of holiday sales will happen online during the next month. And whether your retail site and network is or isn’t in danger of a performance breakdown, now is a good time to re-evaluate your performance strategy and infrastructure in order to make sure that you can handle traffic surges whenever they may occur.
For retail sites, this means making sure that you’ve done proper testing to ensure that your site and applications can handle heavy traffic loads and that you have real-time monitoring in place to detect performance issues when they occur.
And for network administrators, being able to understand and even control network traffic from an application standpoint can mean that, even if employees are going crazy doing on-line shopping, it won’t impact the overall performance of your network and business critical applications.
I address many of these issues in my research into network and application performance and two upcoming reports in particular will dive into the issues of application testing and application control.
Keep an eye out for these reports and I hope you had a happy Cyber Monday and will have a happy Cyber Tuesday, Wednesday, etc.
Jim Rapoza is Senior Research Analyst at Aberdeen Group.
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