The digitization of “Black Friday” brings retailers face-to-face with the harsh realities of leaving customers waiting online instead of in line. Thestreet.com reported Costco alone lost some $11M to a website outage on Thanksgiving Day, and they weren’t the only one. Ulta, Pet Smart, Nordstrom, and others also took a hit when their sites experienced technical issues during the holiday rush.
The Real Cost of Downtime
Amidst the football, tryptophan and flood of teaser emails from every retailer on Earth, a “sorry for the delay” message isn’t going to cut it. Today’s bargain-hunting Black Friday cyber-shoppers will simply swipe to save elsewhere. And the financial impact adds up to more than just missed sales with brand reputation on the line, and the memory of this year’s struggle remaining in the consumer’s mind next year.
Like the infamous Victoria’s Secret special crash of yesteryear, huge losses could have been avoided by recreating Black Friday conditions ahead of time to see whether networks and applications were up to the task.
With www.the20.com estimating the average cost of IT downtime to be $5,600 per minute, major retailers aren’t the only organizations that need to avoid unexpected outages. Facebook, Virgin Blue and Wells Fargo all clocked damages that could have been prevented with proper testing.
How to Avoid Outages
Any application that runs over a network – whether it’s Wi-Fi, 5G, SD-WAN or satellite – must be tested against the rigors of real-world network conditions to ensure it will perform as expected once rolled out to users.
Thousands of enterprises use Netropy network emulators to create complex network environments and proactively optimize application performance against the imperfections of live networks. By simulating multiple links and adding impairments like bandwidth constraints, latency, jitter, and loss at speeds up to 100 Gpbs companies can more accurately predict and avoid the causes of outages.
The cost of a network emulator is a small price to pay when Gartner reports 98% of organizations say a single hour of downtime costs over $100,000. Netropy emulators can be up and running tests in as few as 15 minutes and pay for themselves if even one hour of downtime can be avoided.
The perfect gift for your favorite IT expert this year?
To learn more about performance testing applications reach out to us at info@apposite-tech.com or visit our Netropy page.
