It’s that time of year again. The festive Christmas lights are about to be turned on in the high streets to welcome shoppers, enticing them to buy presents for their loved ones. However, not all the festive commerce occurs in physical stores. Adobe reports that consumers spent by $241.4 billion online between 1st November 2024 and 31st December 2024 - “up 8.7% year-over-year (YoY) and setting a new record for e-commerce.”
The company says consumers spent more than $4 billion in a single day, and m-commerce – mobile shopping - “hit a new milestone, with the majority of online transactions (54.5%) taking place through a smartphone this season (up from 51.1% in 2023).” The highest amount of mobile shopping occurred on Christmas Day itself – involving 65% of online sales in 2024, compared to 65% of them the previous year.
Three categories dominate
Over half of the purchases came from 3 categories: electronics, apparel and furniture of home goods. However, the strongest growth was in the shopping of groceries and cosmetics, which grew between 12.2 and 12.9%. “Other categories with notable growth this season included sporting goods ($7.8 billion, up 7.4% YoY) and toys ($8.2 billion, up 7.8% YoY)”, says its release.
Google AI reveals that even in the UK, 30% of all Christmas sales occurs online with ecommerce volumes being considerably higher than average in the last quarter of the year. It finds that in December 2023, UK shoppers spent £11.2bn online, and “online purchases accounted for 28% of overall retail spending throughout December 2023.”
Christmas Day shopping
With Christmas being front of mind and the need to make savings, Black Friday and Cyber Monday remain a major ecommerce driver because shoppers are shopping earlier to catch the bargains. However, as with Adobe’s research, ecommerce is particularly dominant on Christmas Day, “accounting for about 79% of purchases, as most physical stores are closed” - part citing Megan Robinson’s November 2024 article for Retail Week, ‘UK shoppers are expected to spend £86bn over the festive season, despite a cautious amount of spending over Christmas.'
With this increase in online activity, which also impacts businesses – particularly those involve in ecommerce and m-commerce - data centres often surge in usage. It’s not all about shopping for Christmas presents, and that’s because people want to connect with each other, stream videos, make video calls and play online games.
Data centre surges and outages
However, as they operate on a 24/7 basis, they don’t necessarily see a huge increase in power consumption. The season, nevertheless, can mean that they will experience higher workloads over the festive period, due to increased activity. Unlike the many traditional businesses, data centres don’t close for Christmas. They need to maintain uptime. They are, in effect, like Santa’s sleigh because so many people – consumers and businesses alike – rely upon them to deliver digital services or eventually, as a result of an online order, physical products.
So, while it would be hard to give an exact figure for the financial and economic impact that any data centre downtime might have over the festive period, general estimates from sources like Gartner and BladeRoom Data Centres place the cost of downtime at approximately $5,600 to $9,000 per minute. On top of this, businesses as well as data centres could suffer from other types of damaging impact, such as reputational damage and the loss of customer trust.
But do data centres experience outages at Christmas? Well ,the potential risk is not without precedent. Some data centres have, in the past, experienced significant outages. For example, in 2012, Amazon Web Services (AWS) experienced an outage on Christmas Eve, which lasted 20 hours. Reports explain that the outage was caused by human error and flawed access controls when a developer accidentally deleted a data set. It left millions of Netflix subscribers unable to stream content during peak viewing times.
Human error is not the only cause of outages – not only at Christmas but at any time of the year. In 2015, Vodafone UK’s data centre in Leeds, England, suffered an outage over the Christmas weekend. It was caused by flooding when waters from the River Aire reached the facility. The data centre had to run on emergency power, which eventually failed, due to the encroachment of the floodwaters. Weather conditions delayed engineers from being able to restore voice and data services, which were subsequently operating intermittently and which affected its customers in the North-East. This is because the weather conditions made access to the data centre difficult.
Mind your cyber-stocking
While there are no reports of major cyber-attacks causing data centre outages at Christmas, the season does attract cyber-criminals. So, like Black Friday and Cyber Monday, it’s a period of caution because the threat level to businesses and to consumers is significant. One is that there are often fewer staff available to monitor systems and to respond to cyber-threats. This leaves companies and organisations open to potential attacks because of less rigorous security monitoring - giving hackers an opportunity to strike unnoticed.
Cyber-security firm, Darktrace, reports in 2021: “[Our] security researchers discovered a 30% increase in the average number of attempted ransomware attacks globally over the holiday season in every consecutive year from 2018 to 2020, compared to the monthly average.” The company found that attackers know that organisations may be more likely to pay a ransom quickly to avoid operational disruptions during their busiest sales periods.
While email phishing attacks will play the most major role in cyber-attacks as the biggest threat, there are also online shopping scams, social engineering attacks, insider threats and malware attacks to consider. All of these can have a significant impact on individual and organisations – including on data centres. So, all organisations need to put in place robust cyber-security policies that aim to forestall any kind of cyber-attack. They also need to put in place contingency planning – even for when the cause of an outage is human error or a natural disaster.
Back up, back up!
One key less is not so much about avoiding putting all your eggs in one basket, but about ensuring that your data centre, company or organisations backs up in at least 3 locations. David Trossell, CEO and CTO of Bridgeworks, which recently won the Technology Innovation of the Year at the UK
IT Awards, remarks: “It’s important to ensure that during the festive season data is backed up, and that each disaster recovery site is located outside of their own circles of disruption to enable service continuity whenever any kind of outage occurs.” With backups in place and WAN Acceleration, it’s possible to rapidly failover to maintain services.
While the most prevalently used technology today is the SD-WAN, it often needs a WAN Acceleration overlay to mitigate latency and packet loss. Not only does it boost bandwidth utilisation, but it also enables faster data transfers – whether an SD-WAN is involved or not. One real-world example involved replicating a 2020GB data file in just 25 minutes – 4 times faster than without any acceleration, and so WAN Acceleration offers significant improvements in recovery time objectives (RTOs), and it can enable a big to stay operational or get back to business rapidly.
When there is so much at stake at Christmas, in terms of sales and reputations, he says investing in technology that can improve business and service continuity is the best insurance policy. From a cyber-security perspective, WAN Acceleration can also obfuscate cyber-criminals. It’s therefore the WAN you want, enabling the ecommerce and data centre magic of Christmas. Upon that note, Bridgeworks wishes everyone a safe, happy Christmas and New Year.
