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How to Keep Your Data Center Happy for the Holidays
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In the brick-and-mortar world, this holiday season is shaping up to
be a wash: More people are shopping, but they are spending less.
The online picture is different, however. Greater numbers of people
are going online to shop and spending more. Data collection from
retail sites showed that sales were up nearly 14 percent on the Monday
following Thanksgiving, known as Cyber Monday, compared to a year ago,
according to Web information firm Coremetrics. The amount spent per
sale rose 38 percent, the firm says.
The trend highlights the importance of keeping the data centers
powering e-commerce sites and online traffic running smoothly, says
Dan Blum, principal analyst for the Burton Group.
Availability is crucial, he says. Without availability, you are going
to lose traffic; you are going to lose business.
[ For timely data center news and expert advice on data center
strategy, see CIO.com's Data Center Drilldown section. ]
Trying to revamp data-center operations during December is a sure way
to get snowed under, as simple problems avalanche into operational
issues. However, there are some fundamental lessons that companies who
deal with the crush of customers have learned that companies can
consider in the coming year.
Do Spring Cleaning in October December is too late to worry about
holiday spikes in traffic, says Blum. Companies need to start
analyzing their operations for greater efficiency -- what he calls
spring cleaning, in early fall.
It's a good time to look at your current content distribution
networks and load balancing, he says. It's too late to roll in new
technology, but maybe you can plan for it next year.
In addition to deploying new technology before the end of fall,
companies also need to look at staffing issues to make sure that the
right people are always on staff or on call to handle problems if they
arise. The staffing plan should also be worked out before the end of
fall, he says.
You have to ask, 'What is your minimum staffing level to, not only
keep the plane flying, but keep it flying safely,' Blum says.
Play Defense The holiday rush heightens at least two online threats
for corporate data centers.
Companies that rely on the traffic for revenue, such as e-commerce
providers, need to be prepared for opportunistic denial-of-service
attacks. Cyber criminals have learned to hit companies with a flood of
data during their highest revenue periods, attempting to extort money
from the businesses in exchange for stopping the attacks. In the last
year, 29 percent of companies have reported denial-of-service attacks,
up from 21 percent the prior year, according to a survey of firms
released this week by the Computer Security Institute.
If you are not going to pay the blackmail money and you make our
living on e-commerce ... you might want to think about getting some
distributed denial-of-service mitigation, Blum says. That will give
you the emergency bandwidth to deal with any bandwidth spikes and also
give you the capability to resist these attacks.
In addition to denial-of-service attacks, companies have to be on the
lookout for a jump in intrusion attempts typical of this time of the
year, says Georg Hess, CEO of Art of Defence, a Web application
firewall provider. While attacks do not rise proportionally to the
increase in traffic, the company's clients do see a 5- to 10-percent
increase in attacks.
During this period there is more traffic so it is easier for the
attackers to try out a variety of attacks, Hess says.
Consider a Trip to the Cloud For companies that have thus far
eschewed cloud computing, using the pay-as-you-go resource could be
just the thing for holiday spikes.
Among Art of Defence's clients, which include five of the top-10
e-commerce sites in Europe, using cloud resources to spin up
additional virtual servers to handle a spike in customer traffic has
become a best practice, Hess says.
They start 10 to 14 days before the Christmas season (preparing cloud
capabilities) to make sure that they have the resources they need, he
says.
The addition of cloud computing results in a three-tiered model for
infrastructure: Critical business components stay within the company,
static online components are hosted with a large provider, and cloud
services handle traffic overflow and redundancy, Hess says.
The technique is one of the best use cases, from a CIO perspective,
for cloud capabilities, Hess says.
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