Black Friday is in the rear view mirror, and Cyber Monday is quickly passing by – did your web site survive the storm?  Both Target.com and Paypal.com experienced major outages for Cyber Monday this year.

Being prepared for large spikes in traffic is one thing, loosing sales and upsetting customers can have long term ramifications that can’t be easily fixed.  One of our own employees happened to be participating in this years land rush to Cyber Monday during his lunch break, placed an order online Target successfully only to get emailed hours later that the order had been cancelled due to availability sold out (After having accepted the order).  He was luckier than most, the site took his order online – but the end result the same as other angry Target.com shoppers yesterday – he was left out in the cold this winter shopping season.

Target’s response online twitter confirmed the issues, multiple site delays and crashes and mentioned this year’s traffic exceeding double the previous year’s as a cause (though online traffic reporting and analytics company’s Alexa.com and Netcraft.com could not confirm a double in volume or remotely close to that regarding Target.com).

It brings up a good lesson for any business to keep in mind.  Just what impact is there on your business if your web site or customer data, inventory, or ordering systems are inaccessible or worse, crash and loose data.  Do you have a business continuity plan and what is the financial loss (time, sales, and loss of good will for the future) mean to your business?

Just a couple of years ago around Black Friday and Cyber Monday shopping season Target announced falling victim to millions of account’s being compromised including credit card information – among the worst hacking scandals of the last decade in the news.  Yet Target has survived and continues, but not all business are so lucky to survive major mis-steps like these and being un prepared or blind sided when their IT infrastructure is not adequately prepared.

Being prepared for the best (big volume spikes for the holiday shopping season) also means being prepared for the worst (outages, data loss, data corruption, and more).   Having your web site or IT infrastructure hosted in the cloud using a seasoned IT firm like TurnKey Internet can offer a safety net utilizing hardened technologies to provide the scallability and redundancy crucial for your business.

Also, consider having your corporate data, servers, and web sites mirrored into the Cloud with a service like TurnKey Vault – regardless if you are a Billion dollar retail chain, or a small business office – we all need continuous reliable access to our data to keep the lights on.

Proper planning can mean the difference of going out of business versus surviving in an unexpected crisis – not every business gets multiple strikes against them and lives to tell about it.    Don’t wait until next holiday season to evaluate your cloud-based infrastructure.