Here's a pop quiz for you: are you more concerned with how your systems will perform on Black Friday, or on Cyber Monday? Your answer indicates your level of trust in your inventory/point of sales systems, versus your online shopping systems, respectively.
In theory, neither of these events should concern you. Best practices dictate that you've been prepared for these spikes in usage long before they come to bear. Your Website, for example, probably has some sort of cloudy scaling behavior to help deal with the massive influx of traffic that tends to hit online retailers on the Monday after Black Friday. Best practices also dictate that your internal point of sales systems be well integrated into a message bus or some such queue, enabling all those sales to be cataloged, even when they're coming into your central systems faster than they can be tallied.
But best practices are only so effective. In the good old days, IT and software had to worry about the money, the databases, and the end-points. Maybe there were some systems in between, but essentially, for the software team, Black Friday was simply about cashiers and inventory. With the advent of the Internet, online retail became a big part of that equation. But today, there's all manner of functions that are falling to IT. From indexing security footage, to running schedules, to coordinating inventory across the country, IT and software are asked to tow a heavier burden each year as the holiday season hits us.
For those Web-based catalogs of goodies, cloud computing can serve as something resembling a solution. While payment can't really be processed in the cloud with ease, due to PCI and other compliances, promotion, coupon and catalogs can be hosted there, and that can help to remove some of the burden.
The real problem is the internal systems. How do you make your point of sale system scale in the same way your Website does? Certainly, you can dump more money into an expensive and new-fangled PoS, but more likely, these systems scale in the more traditional way: more boxes, more servers, more cashiers. It's still a meat space solution.
A few weeks ago, I spoke to some folks at Heroku who are convinced that the private cloud is a myth and snake oil. I do feel some of their thoughts on this are valid. But looking at Black Friday and Cyber Monday, I can entirely understand the need for an internal private cloud inside the major retailers. If a central PoS server dies during the big holiday rush, you can bet it's going to cause lost sales as shoppers vacate the premesise while waiting in long lines for a server reboot.
And it's not just Black Friday that can cause issues for your retail systems. A few weeks ago, Target had another of its exclusive designer brand launches. The 400-piece Missoni collection was so popular on its Tuesday launch that Target's Website crashed multiple times. On a so-called Target Tuesday, this isn't a huge issue: the people coming to that site to buy Missoni gear had no other choice, and no competing sales across the street. The only real losers are those who miss out on the deals, which, while heartbreaking, is not a revenue killer.
But what happens if such a crash occurs on Black Friday, or Cyber Monday? The answer is: disaster. Many retailers rely on Christmas time to make or break their entire year. The difference between making and breaking it could easily be a crash on one of these two seminal days.
So here's hoping your Black Fridays are black and not blue, and that your Cyber Mondays see no 503's, 404's or 911's.