RightScale introduced “Cloud for the Holidays,” a solution to help companies ensure that their online promotions, micro-sites, games or applications can scale to meet the peak demands of holiday traffic while avoiding the downtime that can mean lost sales.
RightScale “Cloud for the Holidays” solution lets these companies leverage cloud infrastructure and the RightScale cloud management platform to automatically scale up or down to meet the huge shifts in customers demand during the holiday season.
ComScore data shows that holiday shopping extends beyond Black Friday and Cyber Monday, with 10 individual spending days surpassing $1 billion in sales during the 2011 holiday season, compared to just one day topping $1 billion in 20101.
RightScale analyzed peaks in the use of cloud infrastructure by their customers during the 2011 holiday season across a variety of industries. Overall cloud usage across holiday-influenced consumer sectors spiked up by 44 percent during the second week in November with peak increases as high as 63 percent.
RightScale also analyzed cloud usage by industry.
- Use of cloud infrastructure by online retailers increased by an average of 38 percent during the second week of November 2011 and held at or around that level until peaking at 42 percent in the second week of January 2012.
- Consumer electronics saw an increase of 44 percent over baseline during the second week of November, and continued to increase the following weeks to a peak of 59 percent during the second week in December.
- Social gaming companies also increased cloud usage in early November by 47 percent and peaked at 63 percent during the week after Thanksgiving.
- Entertainment-focused media properties – including film, TV, music and radio – peaked at 38 percent over baseline the second week of November and then declined slightly over the holiday period to only 24 percent over baseline the last week of December 2011.
By leveraging applications in the cloud, retailers and marketers can ensure that their infrastructure is sufficient to meet consumer demand.
According to a source recently cited in Bloomberg Businessweek, “websites lose 10 percent of their audience for every second it takes them to load,” a critical reminder for companies to ensure their web infrastructure is prepared to handle added traffic since it can impact a brand for years to come. And to ensure that customers have a seamless experience with the brand, developing a highly scalable and dynamic application without lag time is crucial.
“Our customers rely on cost-effective cloud infrastructure to run their online websites and applications, and meet their customer demand during the critical holiday season,” said Vice President Marketing, Kim Weins. “RightScale ‘Cloud for the Holidays’ solution enables our customers to architect applications for high availability and scalability, giving them confidence that their promotions or micro-sites will be ready for a surge in traffic at any time.”
The RightScale “Cloud for the Holidays” solution will help companies architect, deploy and manage highly scalable web sites and applications in the cloud to meet the large and often unpredictable surges in holiday traffic.
The solution allows a company to launch their application in the cloud in 30 days and gain confidence in its ability to handle increases in demand throughout the holiday season.
RightScale’s cloud experts will review an application’s architecture for scaling, set up staging and production environments and configure auto-scaling and auto-shrinking to optimize cloud resources.
RightScale partner, Apica, will also conduct load testing to ensure applications can meet spikes in demand.
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