'Retail holidays' hike the payment outage risk

Amazon’s Prime Days are quickly becoming a new retail holiday, much like Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

With Amazon’s Prime Day website outage in 2018, Amazon and other retailers that are planning simultaneous big sales of their own should prepare for high spikes in traffic and take precautions for IT system overloads, just as they do for the traditional holiday season.

Outages at any time, especially during peak times, can have a profoundly negative effect on the bottom line and on customer loyalty.

Retailers that take steps to make their infrastructure more resilient and continually replicate data will be able to recover quickly from any downtime. Innovative retailers are increasing their use of data mobility and orchestration to pre-position workloads to the cloud to scale more easily.

Retailers should prioritize moving critical applications such as POS systems to the cloud as part of their disaster recovery plans.

The ability to quickly, easily and safely move workloads to a cloud environment, whether it be Azure, IBM Cloud or AWS, a managed service provider or private cloud, will ensure they are prepared for any disruption and that downtime and systemic risk to the business are completely mitigated.