Embracing the Indian Festive Shopping Season with uninterrupted access to data

By Sandeep Bhambure

As India prepares to celebrate the biggest festivities of the year, shopping and gifting becomes special due to the convenience of online shopping – thanks to the various sales organized by leading e-commerce players. Consumers await the shopping season to get their hands on the deals. As a result, retailers witness accelerated growth with around 35-40% of the annual sales accounted for consumer goods. With ecommerce growing almost four times faster than in-store retail and set to account for half of all sales made by 2021, businesses cannot afford downtime. Data management & availability holds the key to being successful.

The massive deals and discounts offered by these e-commerce players during the Indian festive season lead to enormous data traffic. This results in the generation of an unprecedented amount of data; navigating through this noise of data with existing legacy infrastructures becomes strenuous for retailers. Year on year, failure to manage this rapid proliferation of data traffic during the festive season leads to website crash or slow load times, causing tremendous businesses losses and bitter consumer experience. Many e-commerce portals continue to deal with database and software downtime incidents that last from just a few minutes to several days. Businesses must engage with Cloud Data Management capabilities to eliminate this data downtime and unavailability.

This surge in data traffic puts a spotlight on uninterrupted access to data and downtime hampers the positive shopping experience of consumers. Additionally, with the advent of multiple online shopping platforms, the e-commerce industry has become fiercely competitive, leaving consumers spoilt for choice and hence the need for uninterrupted access to data becomes essential. With the likes of some large ecommerce companies raising the bar for expectations around digital interactions, and with so much choice online, all it takes is one bad experience for a customer to abandon a website or an app – and never come back.

With the increasing adoption cloud, AI/ML and IoT, companies can truly unlock the potential of these technologies only with Cloud Data Management capabilities in place. The 2019 Veeam Cloud Data Management Report surveyed more than 1,500 IT leaders from 13 countries across the globe to get their insights on the gap experienced between balancing the delivery of IT services and users’ demand for uninterrupted access to data anytime, anywhere. The study reveals that 73% of respondents report an ‘Availability Gap’. This ‘Availability Gap’ costs organisations over $20 million each year in lost revenue and productivity and also affects customer confidence.

Businesses need to bridge the ‘Availability Gap’ to cater to the needs of today’s digital-savvy shoppers who demand high performance and speed for a seamless online shopping experience. They expect the data, backend services and applications to be accessible anytime and anywhere. E-commerce players are constantly working on innovative ways to exceed expectations, reshape customer experience and deliver next generation services. With Cloud Data Management, businesses can avoid unmanageable web traffic and cater to their consumers with a seamless experience across their online shopping journey during the festive season rush.

To ensure uninterrupted access to data, businesses can plan the below to prepare for the Indian festive sale:

• Capacity Planning – To determine the potential peak loads for a site server, businesses must eliminate the guesswork by reviewing previous figures using monitoring data and plan for a significant upscale. This will ensure that retailers are ready to handle increased data traffic.
• Real-time monitoring – Businesses must have a simple way of being alerted to issues in their backup and virtual environments at critical moments. They must be confident that their downtime can be avoided and they can meet their Service Level Agreements (SLA). Not only does this speed up troubleshooting of issues, and diagnosis of root causes, it can enable the backend teams to manage potential issues before it materializes into an actual problem.
• Test and Retest – Businesses must test and retest before the D-day to ensure data Availability and backup.

Uninterrupted access to data is the key for retailers to scale up their business during the festive season. To support and maintain the massive sales growth rate year on year, retailers must leverage the power of Cloud Data Management.

(The author is Managing Director, Veeam Software, India & SAARC)