The end of the year is an important time for your eCommerce business in terms of profit, and holiday season cyberthreats are more frequent and prevalent than ever. Therefore, your IT is under a lot of pressure to keep your company efficient and secure.
Here are some essential IT tasks that will keep your eCommerce business safe and ready for greater success during the holiday season and into the year ahead.
Stress test your online platform
The holiday season means a huge spike in online purchases, which means your systems must be able to handle the load. You can accomplish this by:
- Prioritizing website scalability
- Simulating high traffic to identify limits
- Optimizing tools and configurations based on test results
- Formulating a plan to deal with traffic spikes and sudden crashes
- Scaling up cloud computing, internet bandwidth, or other resources to handle the seasonal demand
By staying prepared for high traffic and minimizing downtime and purchase issues, you can protect your reputation and keep the sales coming.
Year-end technology review
Your business technology has to grow with you to keep your company competitive, but you have to know where you stand before you can make a plan for development. A full IT audit of your network will show you where you need to improve to meet your goals. Your year-end technology should include the following components:
Cybersecurity audit
Cybersecurity can make or break your online retail business. Review your current cybersecurity posture to determine if it is up to date. It should be able to defend you from the latest in distributed denial-of-service attacks, keep your vital data encrypted, and prevent intrusions into your systems.
Check if there are patches or upgrades to your cybersecurity tools, and review incident reports to determine what actions to take in the new year to bolster your defenses.
Business continuity strategy audit
Downtime is a nuisance for business in the best of times, but halted operations during the high season could be fatal for your eCommerce company. Your year-end audit should include a review and update of your disaster recovery plan, as well as a refresher for your employees so they know what to do in times of crisis.
You’ll also want to check your data backup tools to make sure they are up to date and able to restore your vital data efficiently in the event of a downtime event so you can get back to business fast.
Cloud systems audit
eCommerce relies more and more on cloud infrastructure, which is why you should review your network’s performance to check if it is still protected against the latest threats and can handle the increase in holiday traffic. You may have to communicate with your cloud or IT services provider to get the right data.
Harvest, collate, and analyze the year’s data
The end of the year is the perfect time to review the data you’ve collected to plan your future strategy. Information is power, so collect data from not just your customers to track their behavior, but also your employees and IT systems to see what changes are required to optimize performance.
Collect feedback on IT usage
In addition to behavioral data, now is also a good time to collect direct feedback from both customers and employees to determine if you are utilizing the right tools in the right way. Use tools such as customer email surveys to check how your communication and automated customer service technologies are doing. Also, ask your workforce about which technologies help them most and which IT tools need to be developed to provide better performance.
Get an outside expert opinion
An unbiased, bird’s eye perspective from an experienced outside consultant can help you identify what IT tasks will benefit your eCommerce business most during the holiday season and the best ways to perform them. Contact outsourceIT’s technology consultants, and we’ll leverage our decades of IT knowledge to help you formulate a year-end IT checklist that will maximize your performance for the high season and prepare you for success in the new year.
