Boy, what a difference a year makes.
“Black Friday” usually refers to the day after Thanksgiving, when retailers, both online and offline, started getting rushes of orders in order to fulfill Christmas demand. But unless you’re a Wall Street firm, for whom Christmas has come early, you’re probably cutting back on expenditures this holiday season.
Now, it’s probably referring to any Friday that you re-read your quarterly 401(k) or 529 statement.
Still, whether or not people –spend- more online this holiday season, they’ll probably be making a similar number of transactions – that is, Hershey bars instead of Godiva chocolate, Playstation 2s instead of Wiis, Go-Bots instead of Transformers…
And with every dollar counting, the one thing that retailers and suppliers can’t afford on Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year are performance slowdowns like the ones that hit Costco, Victoria’s Secret, Lowe’s, and Macy’s last year.
Additionally, even if you aren’t a retailer, Cyber Monday typically sends some Web traffic spikes over company networks as employees use the high speed connections work provides in order to make their purchases.
In either case, you can analyze network traffic flows to identify what traffic is mission critical, what is mission irrelevant, and what is mission impossible. After quantifying the impact of certain types of traffic on network performance, you can then implement quality of service policies to ensure that business critical apps have priority access to network resources.
We know that on Friday and next Monday, there will be a higher than normal volume of Internet traffic. The trick is finding out how much of an impact it will have and preventing it from impacting application performance.
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