Add a comment
Stuffed from Thankgiving turkey, millions of people went shopping the next day, which is known as “Black Friday” because:
a. it’s the day that retailers typically end up in-the-black
b. the shopping traffic can be hell on both retail workers and the customers themselves, and
c. all those footprints in and out of the malls leave the floors as dark as the heart of a mean-mistreatin’ woman, if my subscription to “The Quarterly Journal of Blues Medicine” is accurate.
Now the trade pubs are reporting the impact of all this shopping including a report by Mike Vizard that Black Friday crushed many online retailers in this report on eweek.com. He noted that many retail giants reported significant performance slowdowns on their online commerce sites just as the holiday season got started. Costco, Victoria’s Secret, Lowe's, and Macy's were all hit hard by the surge of buyers on Black Friday. Most of these retailers seem to aware of the problem as they are expected to spend $10 billion annually on IT by 2011.
This year, the National Retail Federation also put forward the idea of “Cyber Monday.” All those people who couldn’t find the exact gift in the store, who thought the retail prices were a little high, and, of course, people who wouldn’t be caught dead in a mall the day after Thanksgiving often come back to work on Monday and start shopping on the high speed connections work provides.
According to Reuters, online shoppers spent $733M USD this Cyber Monday. This was a 21% increase from last year's $608 million in sales. It was also an 84% increase from the average daily online spending totals during the previous 4 weeks. And much of this online shopping was done from WORK resulting in a large spike of traffic over the network which bogged down the performance of business-critical applications that actually drive the business.
Sadly, attempts at formalizing policies for enterprise network usage, web site blacklists, and web site “black out” dates aren’t fully addressing the problem. In a survey NetQoS conducted earlier this year, we found that recreational use of network resources is impacting network performance despite formal policies to restrict it. The survey revealed that 90 percent of participants have a formal policy in place to limit recreational use such as instant messaging, music/video downloads, social networking sites, online shopping, and news/sports sites. However, recreational usage continues to rise and is now impacting the performance of business-critical applications on more than 60 percent of networks.
The good news is, it’s not too late to mitigate the risks associated with the upcoming Super Bowl blitz that we wrote about on the Network Performance Daily blog last year. By putting your network monitoring tools to good use now, you can examine exactly how your network performs when a large spike in traffic occurs - so that you know what to do to be ready for the next spike in traffic when it occurs. Specifically, NetQoS advises network engineers to take action now to:
- analyze network traffic flows to identify unauthorized network traffic
- quantify its impact on network performance
- and implement quality of service policies to ensure business-critical applications have priority access to network resources
Admittedly, this is not the trickiest of problems to solve. You just need the right tools. As we detail in this best practices white paper on NetFlow monitoring most of this online traffic is fairly easy to identify and measure if you are using NetFlow and a NetFlow monitoring product like NetQoS ReporterAnalyzer to analyze traffic. It’s also, in most cases, predictable – you know that every Monday after Thanksgiving, there will be a higher volume of Internet traffic. You know that the Super Bowl and March Madness will also have an impact. But do you know how much of an impact and how to prevent it from impacting application performance for those workers who are actually working? Do you know what you will need to do to mitigate risks?
Dr. Jim Metzler, vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates and author of “The Handbook of Application Delivery” advises “No matter what an organization’s policy on recreational use of IT resources states, network professionals still need the capability to manage WAN traffic to ensure optimal application delivery.”
So, how did your network weather Cyber Monday this year? If you can’t quickly and precisely quantify the answer to that question, it’s time to put network performance monitoring and management software on your Holiday shopping list!
