In recent years Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales have grown globally, becoming the most profitable shopping events of the year for many businesses. As we rapidly approach the events, which fall on the 24th and 27th of November respectively, we are looking at how cloud scalability can put your business ahead of the pack.
As customers search for the top bargains, e-commerce sites can expect significant traffic spikes. If your sites are not prepared for this increase in traffic, this can lead to slow running speeds, and even site crashes and downtime. Our research has demonstrated that a third of customers would move to a competitors’ website after less than 30 seconds, if their go-to brand suffered an outage. For e-commerce businesses, this could damage your business’s hard-earned reputation and cost thousands in lost revenue.
To make the most of increased demand, it is vital to optimise the digital experience for your site visitors, and an easily scalable cloud platform is key to achieving this.
What is cloud scalability?
Scalability in the cloud refers to the ability to increase or decrease IT resources as needed to meet varying demands. It plays a critical role in cloud infrastructure, guaranteeing the ability to manage traffic and maintain uninterrupted and efficient service, preventing crashes or performance slowdowns. This is achieved by adjusting processing power, data storage capacity, and networking using the established cloud computing infrastructure.
In on-premise infrastructure, scalability is possible, but it is time and resource intensive, and is costly for a business. It is also less flexible, as it relies on physical machines with relatively fixed resources. In contrast, cloud infrastructure uses virtual machines (VMs), which are highly flexible, and can be quickly and easily scaled up or down, moved to a different server, or hosted on multiple servers at once.
Scalable cloud infrastructure is a cost-effective solution for businesses. By scaling according to demand, you avoid the upfront and ongoing costs of resources that will be left unused for most of the year and instead, only pay for these resources during peak traffic periods. When your traffic returns to normal, you will not be charged for resources you are not using.
How can you prepare your platform for Black Friday?
When preparing for Black Friday, you should analyse your existing infrastructure and consider if it can handle potential traffic spikes.
If you are currently using on-premise infrastructure, it is unlikely you will be able to easily scale up to support your Black Friday traffic without significant cost. Consider whether a cloud solution would reduce long-term costs for your business with its flexibility for scaling.
If you are on the cloud, does your provider offer a platform with the scalability you need? Many public cloud hyperscalers may offer scalability, but without the flexibility you need. You may be unable to scale up quickly before your peak periods, or unable to scale down afterwards, leaving you paying for the higher level of resources.
To optimise your resources ahead of Black Friday, you need a provider that offers fast and efficient scalability ahead of your traffic spikes, and the flexibility to scale back after the festive period. This will be the most cost-effective solution to prepare your sites and optimise the digital experience for your customers.
Cloud scalability will additionally support your business year-round, through any periods of high traffic you experience – other examples include Boxing Day sales, Valentine’s Day, and Mother’s Day.
How can our scalable cloud solutions support your business?
Our cloud solutions at Hyve are designed with scalability in mind.
Our customer, Remarkable Commerce, demonstrates the benefits of our unlimited scalability. The agency provides bespoke e-commerce platforms for leading UK retailers, with high resource needs and traffic spikes. Migrating to a private cloud platform with scalability taken into account has allowed Remarkable to run double revenue sales days with minimal downtime. Read Remarkable’s case study for more details on their cloud solution.
Our cloud solutions are built bespoke to your needs. When you work with Hyve, our experts will consult with you to assess your requirements year-round, including potential high-traffic periods. We will work with you to explore new ways to deploy, monitor, and operate environments to suit your requirements, with scalability considered from the start.
Find out how you can utilise cloud scalability to dynamically add resources during peak times – contact our cloud experts today.
