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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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Two Words for the Holiday Rush: Adequate Capacity

Scott Hollis

Depending upon your specific industry, the holiday rush can account for 75% – 85% of your total revenue. You cannot be caught unprepared and your systems have to be able to handle the surge in traffic. So how do you make sure your systems are not going to let you down?

Two words, adequate capacity. Capacity is the #1 reason for service degradation or failure.

Start with historical data. What was the load on your systems last year? This will probably give you the best baseline and starting point.

Now estimate how and why that will change this year. Do you have a blockbuster toy? Or are you offering the iPhone 6 at significant discount? Have you launched a massive marketing campaign or is the marketing group planning something new? Whatever it is, understand how that will impact your demand and how long the additional demand can be expected to last. Make sure you provision for it.

Harness the clouds. You certainly do not want to carry excess capacity all year round, just for this one day or a relatively short time period. Reach out for on-demand capacity from a public or private cloud provider. Run synthetic transactions using your APM tools to ensure your infrastructure will not fold under pressure. Use cloud bursting for as long as needed and dial down as you notice decline in demand. As you move your services to and from the cloud, remember, the location of your services should be transparent to the customers.

Unified monitoring tools can manage your services whether they are running on your local infrastructure, on your private cloud or even a third party public cloud. When issues happen (yes – "when" not "if") you can quickly identify the root cause and get a rapid resolution, hopefully well before the customer is impacted.

You want your customers to be able to access your site and more importantly, you want them to be able transact business while they are there. Make it easy for them and less of a headache for you and your organization.

Scott Hollis is Director of Product Marketing for Zenoss.

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According to Auvik's 2025 IT Trends Report, 60% of IT professionals feel at least moderately burned out on the job, with 43% stating that their workload is contributing to work stress. At the same time, many IT professionals are naming AI and machine learning as key areas they'd most like to upskill ...

Businesses that face downtime or outages risk financial and reputational damage, as well as reducing partner, shareholder, and customer trust. One of the major challenges that enterprises face is implementing a robust business continuity plan. What's the solution? The answer may lie in disaster recovery tactics such as truly immutable storage and regular disaster recovery testing ...

IT spending is expected to jump nearly 10% in 2025, and organizations are now facing pressure to manage costs without slowing down critical functions like observability. To meet the challenge, leaders are turning to smarter, more cost effective business strategies. Enter stage right: OpenTelemetry, the missing piece of the puzzle that is no longer just an option but rather a strategic advantage ...

Amidst the threat of cyberhacks and data breaches, companies install several security measures to keep their business safely afloat. These measures aim to protect businesses, employees, and crucial data. Yet, employees perceive them as burdensome. Frustrated with complex logins, slow access, and constant security checks, workers decide to completely bypass all security set-ups ...

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Cloudbrink's Personal SASE services provide last-mile acceleration and reduction in latency

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 13, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses hybrid multi-cloud networking strategy ... 

In high-traffic environments, the sheer volume and unpredictable nature of network incidents can quickly overwhelm even the most skilled teams, hindering their ability to react swiftly and effectively, potentially impacting service availability and overall business performance. This is where closed-loop remediation comes into the picture: an IT management concept designed to address the escalating complexity of modern networks ...

In 2025, enterprise workflows are undergoing a seismic shift. Propelled by breakthroughs in generative AI (GenAI), large language models (LLMs), and natural language processing (NLP), a new paradigm is emerging — agentic AI. This technology is not just automating tasks; it's reimagining how organizations make decisions, engage customers, and operate at scale ...

In the early days of the cloud revolution, business leaders perceived cloud services as a means of sidelining IT organizations. IT was too slow, too expensive, or incapable of supporting new technologies. With a team of developers, line of business managers could deploy new applications and services in the cloud. IT has been fighting to retake control ever since. Today, IT is back in the driver's seat, according to new research by Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) ...

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