Six Ways Your Systems Support Should be Safeguarding Your Business Growth
The right type of systems support can save your retail business time and money and safeguard your business growth. Is yours up to the job?
Posted by Steve Drew, 28th October 2011
Today's trading conditions are tough for retailers. While ecommerce may seem like the goose laying golden eggs, the growth associated with online retail comes with rigorous technical demands, and these demands can quickly escalate into considerable time and expense.
Yes, ecommerce is a major growth area in retail, and yes, the growth seen in the online arm of many of our high street names can be the exception to a somewhat less captivating picture. But in order to take advantage of the surge in online buying it is vital that your business has the right support in place.
Given the advantages of arranging the best human support a business needs at a fraction of the cost of recruiting your own team, increasing numbers of businesses are outsourcing in order to optimise flexibility and scalability for planned growth.
Whether you have already outsourced support for your ecommerce business or are planning to do so in the near future, here are six important areas you need to ensure your support provider is taking care of.
1. Hosting
A well selected hosting environment can save you time and money and allow your business to concentrate on growing. Cloud hosting will add real value and innovation to your business. Technicians will be able to quickly build new servers, monitor them closely and finely tune them around your traffic spikes.
2. Monitoring
In an ideal world, your ecommerce store will be running smoothly 24/7, but in reality issues such as high customer load, limited hard drive space and processing power can lead to problems, and sometimes even downtime. The key is to be as prepared as possible to minimise such outages. Make sure you have ample monitoring through automated alerts and checks, and that you are provided with a solid response time for issue management and resolution.
3. Security
Hackers are a fact of life but your business need not be an easy target. Ensure that your infrastructure is properly protected through server hardening, regular security screening, vulnerability scanning and through the restriction of access to public-facing servers.
4. Backup
We all have a story about a personal backup crisis, but on an enterprise scale this is just not acceptable. Ensure peace of mind by developing a strategy that works for your business, including the regular backup of servers and databases in different geographical locations.
5. Databases
When business moves as quickly as it does today, you need fast and efficient access to your data and excellent response times for your customers. Ensure you have the right database for your business, that it's finely tuned and that that it replicates across multiple servers.
6. Compliance
PCI compliance should be a 'no-brainer' for your e-retail business. Ensure your site is fully up-to-date. Consider implementing pre-checks before your annual review is due. This helps lessen the impact of the report and means you are compliant more quickly.
Support from Open Plus
Support done properly, and at the right cost, is exactly the type of opportunity that can make ecommerce the fast growing industry it is. Whether you are already dealing with a support provider, facing the Beauty Parade, or just haven't considered it before, ensure that these issues are all satisfactorily addressed. If not, you need a different provider.
If you'd like to hear our answers, free of charge and without commitment, to the above issues,contact us here, or call 0800 610 1043.
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