Friday, September 6, 2013

Just Another Manic Cyber Monday: Are you Ready?

Once September starts to roll around it seems like everyone’s preparing for something, be it returning to school, the fantasy football season, corporate budget planning, or looking for deals on end of model year vehicles. For me, it’s the time of year when I help people prepare for Cyber Monday, which has become the biggest online shopping day of the year.

So, is your website really ready to capitalize on all that buying fervor? Think about it. By September, your company is surely finalizing new products and marketing campaigns for the holiday season. But all those preparations will be for naught if your website isn't up to the challenge of increased holiday traffic – especially if your ops group doesn't have a system in place to monitor and react to the impact of that traffic in real time. The truth is, if your organization doesn't have a strategy in place by early September, you have a scant few weeks remaining to put one together. After that is done, you’re at serious risk of becoming ‘that company’ – you know, the one that makes headlines this holiday season for a massive site outage instead of record sales numbers – and the risk increases exponentially with every week you delay. If your company sells products that people want to give as gifts for the holidays, Cyber Monday is likely to be the busiest day of the year for your website.

Read the rest of this post here.
 
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Scott Barber
Chief Technologist, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
About.me

Co-Author, Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications
Author, Web Load Testing for Dummies
Contributing Author, Beautiful Testing, and How To Reduce the Cost of Testing

I don't produce software systems.
I help those who do produce software systems do it better.
I am a tester.