At the end of the year, companies worldwide start to prepare the corporate IT infrastructures for intensive traffic and unstable loads. It's the time when corporations, especially e-commerce, wholesale and retail industries, make most of their annual revenue in just a few weeks. But, the risks of being hit with a software outage increase equally, no matter what industry your business belongs to.

Don’t see risks of software downtime? Trust your provider? Well, as we saw in December 2021, even AWS was hit with an outage that took down some websites and services such as Disney+, Slack, Alexa, etc. In a matter of minutes, Amazon’s warehouse and delivery operations reported on Reddit that the issue became nationwide. Reddit news: https://www.reddit.com/.../so_apparently_amazon_is_down.../

We have prepared useful tips and recommendations that can help your IT infrastructure handle traffic increases, avoid software downtimes, and prevent you from losing revenue during the holiday season.

Top 10 holiday-proof tips to keep IT infrastructure up while holidays:

1. Monitor business-critical metrics with a proper threshold. Choose the proper framework for IT infrastructure monitoring and alerting.
2. Get actionable insights. Don’t work with raw data but get the most out of it to know what steps should be taken, especially under the pressure of intensive traffic.
3. Streamline alerting. Ensure your alerts matter to not waste time on fake occasions, e.g. when someone accidentally hits the load balancer with faulty requests.
4. Ensure that your service is ready to handle more loads through auto-scaling. Check that the autoscale policy is configured and working.
5. Ensure that your storage & disks have enough free space. Don’t rely on luck but always have an extra amount of resources available.
6. Perform synthetic monitoring for your websites and APIs. It’s better to benchmark web services through emulation than real and unpredictable traffic loads.
7. Decide a “plan B” workflow in the case of third-party services getting down. Be circumspect since even the most widely used platforms may fail.
8. Identify on-call workflow and engineers for weekends and holidays. It’s not a manager’s preference, it’s a necessity.
9. Keep software up-to-date. Apply updates, patches, and hotfixes in advance to avoid a bug causing downtime.
10. Enhance IT security. The holiday season (in fact, all seasons) isn't the right time to experience data breaches, leakage, or get contaminated pieces of data from the Internet.

Take care of your IT infrastructures!

Provided by InsightCat https://insightcat.com/