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Here's How Retailers Can Win 2025 with Greater Digital Resiliency

Mimi Shalash
Splunk

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years. Retailers must stay digitally agile throughout the year and especially during the high stakes Cyber 5 shopping (more commonly known as the frenzy between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday). And the numbers don't lie. Black Friday 2024 saw an outstanding $10.8 billion in online spending, a notable 10% growth from 2023.

To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues. According to Splunk's 2024 Hidden Costs of Downtime Report, downtime costs the retail industry as much as $287 million per year.

Therefore, to stay in style, retailers need advanced strategies to achieve operational alignment and foster a culture of digital resilience (and hopefully couture level profits).

The Impact of Downtime to Customer Trust

The rise of online shopping has expanded the peak season from November through January, with promotions starting earlier and lasting longer. That means deals start earlier, last longer, and shoppers expect more. For US retailers, the window between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a race against time, with five less days between the holidays and intense competition.

Fighting for every sale, applications and digital services such as self-serve kiosks, chatbots, AI-powered shopping suggestions play a vital role in shaping the customer experience. With consumers spending billions, any downtime could result in massive financial losses and erode customer trust. A few seconds delay can increase abandonment rates, while a complete website crash can lead to immediate revenue loss and long-term reputational damage. Talk about a serious style faux pas.

Downtime doesn't just drain sales, it can also crash stock prices by an average of 2.5% and knock a brand off its search engine pedestal. Research shows it can take up to 60 days to rebuild brand health and 75 days for revenue to recover; jeopardizing brand reputation and customer loyalty.

As a result, the pressure on retailers to deliver fast, reliable, and disruption free experiences during these critical periods has never been higher.

How Retailers Can Build Digital Resiliency

As the stakes continue to rise, the key to thriving in this high-pressure environment lies in preparation. To prevent downtime and deliver seamless experiences, retailers must prioritize resilience well ahead of peak shopping periods. Regularly testing system scalability and addressing vulnerabilities enable businesses to handle surges in traffic without compromising performance.

However, without the right tools to monitor and analyze customer experience alongside back-end performance, teams risk delays in identifying and resolving issues. That's where observability becomes a critical component of digital resilience.

Observability empowers teams to uncover and resolve issues, even the ones no one sees coming. Take the story of a major retailer during a peak shopping period, a time when every second counts. Suddenly, checkout failures began to spike, leaving the team scrambling for answers. No alerts were triggered, and the usual suspects like application logs and infrastructure health revealed nothing unusual.

That's when they turned to observability. Real-time tracing and metrics correlation quickly unraveled the mystery: a misconfigured SSL certificate on a third-party payment API was causing intermittent timeouts. Armed with data, the team acted quickly, coordinating with the provider to fix the issue and deploying a failover mechanism to ensure uninterrupted service. Thanks to their observability practice, they avoided a potential crisis, keeping their operations smooth and their customers happy.

Practicing Digital Resilience in 2025 and Beyond

The countdown to the next peak holiday season has begun, and now is the time to turn digital resilience into a competitive advantage. Establishing a strong observability practice, combined with collaboration across security, ITOps, and engineering teams, is no longer optional; it's essential.

Moving forward, resolving issues in the moment won't be enough. Retailers must proactively prepare for peak times to avoid disruptions altogether. By implementing the right technology, rigorously stress-testing systems ahead of traffic surges, and ensuring end-to-end visibility across their tech stack, businesses can better anticipate shopper demands and avoid the costly consequences of downtime and investigations.

Just like wearing the wrong shoes, neglecting digital resilience can leave your business limping through the most critical moments. Step up your game because when it comes to peak performance, there is no room for blisters. 

Mimi Shalash is Observability Advisor at Splunk, a Cisco company

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Here's How Retailers Can Win 2025 with Greater Digital Resiliency

Mimi Shalash
Splunk

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years. Retailers must stay digitally agile throughout the year and especially during the high stakes Cyber 5 shopping (more commonly known as the frenzy between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday). And the numbers don't lie. Black Friday 2024 saw an outstanding $10.8 billion in online spending, a notable 10% growth from 2023.

To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues. According to Splunk's 2024 Hidden Costs of Downtime Report, downtime costs the retail industry as much as $287 million per year.

Therefore, to stay in style, retailers need advanced strategies to achieve operational alignment and foster a culture of digital resilience (and hopefully couture level profits).

The Impact of Downtime to Customer Trust

The rise of online shopping has expanded the peak season from November through January, with promotions starting earlier and lasting longer. That means deals start earlier, last longer, and shoppers expect more. For US retailers, the window between Thanksgiving and Christmas is a race against time, with five less days between the holidays and intense competition.

Fighting for every sale, applications and digital services such as self-serve kiosks, chatbots, AI-powered shopping suggestions play a vital role in shaping the customer experience. With consumers spending billions, any downtime could result in massive financial losses and erode customer trust. A few seconds delay can increase abandonment rates, while a complete website crash can lead to immediate revenue loss and long-term reputational damage. Talk about a serious style faux pas.

Downtime doesn't just drain sales, it can also crash stock prices by an average of 2.5% and knock a brand off its search engine pedestal. Research shows it can take up to 60 days to rebuild brand health and 75 days for revenue to recover; jeopardizing brand reputation and customer loyalty.

As a result, the pressure on retailers to deliver fast, reliable, and disruption free experiences during these critical periods has never been higher.

How Retailers Can Build Digital Resiliency

As the stakes continue to rise, the key to thriving in this high-pressure environment lies in preparation. To prevent downtime and deliver seamless experiences, retailers must prioritize resilience well ahead of peak shopping periods. Regularly testing system scalability and addressing vulnerabilities enable businesses to handle surges in traffic without compromising performance.

However, without the right tools to monitor and analyze customer experience alongside back-end performance, teams risk delays in identifying and resolving issues. That's where observability becomes a critical component of digital resilience.

Observability empowers teams to uncover and resolve issues, even the ones no one sees coming. Take the story of a major retailer during a peak shopping period, a time when every second counts. Suddenly, checkout failures began to spike, leaving the team scrambling for answers. No alerts were triggered, and the usual suspects like application logs and infrastructure health revealed nothing unusual.

That's when they turned to observability. Real-time tracing and metrics correlation quickly unraveled the mystery: a misconfigured SSL certificate on a third-party payment API was causing intermittent timeouts. Armed with data, the team acted quickly, coordinating with the provider to fix the issue and deploying a failover mechanism to ensure uninterrupted service. Thanks to their observability practice, they avoided a potential crisis, keeping their operations smooth and their customers happy.

Practicing Digital Resilience in 2025 and Beyond

The countdown to the next peak holiday season has begun, and now is the time to turn digital resilience into a competitive advantage. Establishing a strong observability practice, combined with collaboration across security, ITOps, and engineering teams, is no longer optional; it's essential.

Moving forward, resolving issues in the moment won't be enough. Retailers must proactively prepare for peak times to avoid disruptions altogether. By implementing the right technology, rigorously stress-testing systems ahead of traffic surges, and ensuring end-to-end visibility across their tech stack, businesses can better anticipate shopper demands and avoid the costly consequences of downtime and investigations.

Just like wearing the wrong shoes, neglecting digital resilience can leave your business limping through the most critical moments. Step up your game because when it comes to peak performance, there is no room for blisters. 

Mimi Shalash is Observability Advisor at Splunk, a Cisco company

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IT outages, caused by poor-quality software updates, are no longer rare incidents but rather frequent occurrences, directly impacting over half of US consumers. According to the 2024 Software Failure Sentiment Report from Harness, many now equate these failures to critical public health crises ...

In just a few months, Google will again head to Washington DC and meet with the government for a two-week remedy trial to cement the fate of what happens to Chrome and its search business in the face of ongoing antitrust court case(s). Or, Google may proactively decide to make changes, putting the power in its hands to outline a suitable remedy. Regardless of the outcome, one thing is sure: there will be far more implications for AI than just a shift in Google's Search business ... 

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In today's fast-paced digital world, Application Performance Monitoring (APM) is crucial for maintaining the health of an organization's digital ecosystem. However, the complexities of modern IT environments, including distributed architectures, hybrid clouds, and dynamic workloads, present significant challenges ... This blog explores the challenges of implementing application performance monitoring (APM) and offers strategies for overcoming them ...

Service disruptions remain a critical concern for IT and business executives, with 88% of respondents saying they believe another major incident will occur in the next 12 months, according to a study from PagerDuty ...

IT infrastructure (on-premises, cloud, or hybrid) is becoming larger and more complex. IT management tools need data to drive better decision making and more process automation to complement manual intervention by IT staff. That is why smart organizations invest in the systems and strategies needed to make their IT infrastructure more resilient in the event of disruption, and why many are turning to application performance monitoring (APM) in conjunction with high availability (HA) clusters ...

In today's data-driven world, the management of databases has become increasingly complex and critical. The following are findings from Redgate's 2025 The State of the Database Landscape report ...

With the 2027 deadline for SAP S/4HANA migrations fast approaching, organizations are accelerating their transition plans ... For organizations that intend to remain on SAP ECC in the near-term, the focus has shifted to improving operational efficiencies and meeting demands for faster cycle times ...

As applications expand and systems intertwine, performance bottlenecks, quality lapses, and disjointed pipelines threaten progress. To stay ahead, leading organizations are turning to three foundational strategies: developer-first observability, API platform adoption, and sustainable test growth ...