If the events of this past weekend are anything to go by, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and similar organizations should take their cues from the retail industry.
I’m not talking about tactics when it comes to responding in court to the current administration's executive orders. I’m talking about how they manage online traffic.
Consider what happened this weekend after President Trump signed a controversial executive order. As a result of this action, the ACLU received more than $24 million in online donations – seven times the amount it receives in an entire year – from 356,306 people. Not surprisingly, this traffic spike caused the site to briefly go down.
Traffic surges can happen when you least expect them. Political events can have a huge impact on people’s online behavior, as the ACLU’s website outage clearly demonstrates. While the ACLU might reasonably have expected online donations to increase in light of recent events, they had no way of knowing they were about to experience the largest surge in donations in their 97-year history.
Online retailers know they need to ensure they’re “always open” in today's 24/7 on-demand world. Fortunately, thanks to modern load testing and performance monitoring technologies, site owners can load test at massive scale via the cloud to ensure their sites can handle immense traffic, along with unprecedented visibility into the real-time speed and availability of their sites.
Here are 7 tips that organizations like the ACLU can borrow from the retail world:
1. Remember that every site fails eventually
There’s no such thing as 100% uptime. When a site goes down, it isn’t because someone forgot to flip a switch. It’s because modern websites are complex mechanisms. Any complex system will fail eventually.
2. Accept that you can’t performance test for every contingency
Performance tests are a reliable way to guarantee that your site won’t go down — as long as it’s subjected to the same conditions defined within your test parameters. But you can’t test every single variation of every single parameter. When loads are different from what you modeled in your tests, you may have problems.
3. Know that the past is not a predictor of the future
Load patterns are unpredictable. Yes, you can and should take past load patterns into account when preparing your site, but this won’t cover you for every contingency. Just because you experienced certain load patterns for one event doesn’t mean that load pattern will be consistent for other events.
Over time — even very short periods of time — your site changes, your visitors change and your visitors’ behavior changes. There are no constants. Surprises happen.
4. See failure as an opportunity
Outages suck. There’s no sugarcoating that. But if you must experience one, then you should learn everything you can from it. Make it your mission to get to the root cause of the problem and develop new testing processes to prevent the issue from recurring.
5. Embrace continuous improvement
The web is a dynamic space, which means none of us ever get to stand back, dust off our hands and exclaim: “There! It’s finished!” Instead we build, we evolve, we fail (sometimes), we learn, we evolve some more, so on. We value small evolutionary steps—adding new tools and processes gradually — versus huge overnight changes. We recognize that rigorous performance testing and monitoring don’t guarantee 100% uptime, but they do allow us to fail faster and iterate sooner.
6. Be aware that page slowdowns can cause as much — or more — damage to your business as outages
Outages are stressful, but they’re not the worst performance issue that most sites face. If a site goes down, you’ll probably just try it again a few hours later. Most of us accept that these blips happen. But if a site is consistently slow, people could eventually stop visiting altogether.
Ultimately, the ACLU and similar organizations need to realize that the Trump administration will make the news cycle a perpetual “Cyber Monday." They will need to be prepared. Following the example of online retailers will help them be ready for their moment in the spotlight.
Tammy Everts is Director of Content and Editorial at SOASTA.
The Latest
App sprawl has been a concern for technologists for some time, but it has never presented such a challenge as now. As organizations move to implement generative AI into their applications, it's only going to become more complex ... Observability is a necessary component for understanding the vast amounts of complex data within AI-infused applications, and it must be the centerpiece of an app- and data-centric strategy to truly manage app sprawl ...
Fundamentally, investments in digital transformation — often an amorphous budget category for enterprises — have not yielded their anticipated productivity and value ... In the wake of the tsunami of money thrown at digital transformation, most businesses don't actually know what technology they've acquired, or the extent of it, and how it's being used, which is directly tied to how people do their jobs. Now, AI transformation represents the biggest change management challenge organizations will face in the next one to two years ...
As businesses focus more and more on uncovering new ways to unlock the value of their data, generative AI (GenAI) is presenting some new opportunities to do so, particularly when it comes to data management and how organizations collect, process, analyze, and derive insights from their assets. In the near future, I expect to see six key ways in which GenAI will reshape our current data management landscape ...
The rise of AI is ushering in a new disrupt-or-die era. "Data-ready enterprises that connect and unify broad structured and unstructured data sets into an intelligent data infrastructure are best positioned to win in the age of AI ...
A majority (61%) of organizations are forced to evolve or rethink their data and analytics (D&A) operating model because of the impact of disruptive artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, according to a new Gartner survey ...
The power of AI, and the increasing importance of GenAI are changing the way people work, teams collaborate, and processes operate ... Gartner identified the top data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2024 that are driving the emergence of a wide range of challenges, including organizational and human issues ...
IT and the business are disconnected. Ask the business what IT does and you might hear "they implement infrastructure, write software, and migrate things to cloud," and for some that might be the extent of their knowledge of IT. Similarly, IT might know that the business "markets and sells and develops product," but they may not know what those functions entail beyond the unit they serve the most ...
Cloud spending continues to soar. Globally, cloud users spent a mind-boggling $563.6 billion last year on public cloud services, and there's no sign of a slowdown ... CloudZero's State of Cloud Cost Report 2024 found that organizations are still struggling to gain control over their cloud costs and that a lack of visibility is having a significant impact. Among the key findings of the report ...
The use of hybrid multicloud models is forecasted to double over the next one to three years as IT decision makers are facing new pressures to modernize IT infrastructures because of drivers like AI, security, and sustainability, according to the Enterprise Cloud Index (ECI) report from Nutanix ...
Over the last 20 years Digital Employee Experience has become a necessity for companies committed to digital transformation and improving IT experiences. In fact, by 2025, more than 50% of IT organizations will use digital employee experience to prioritize and measure digital initiative success ...
