Network managers hit by Web traffic overload
Problem worsens as unforgiving Christmas season pressures infrastructure
New research shows that dramatic increases in traffic are overloading company Internet infrastructures, impacting the critical Christmas sales period. 86 per cent of global companies had seen a growth in traffic over the last year, with the majority of this linked to greater website usage. The research was carried out by Zeus Technology, the acknowledged leader in Internet infrastructure solutions and surveyed over 1,900 global organizations with a web presence.
Websites are now operating in an increasingly unforgiving world. Only 19 per cent of companies felt that downtime was acceptable internally, a response mirrored by consumer behavior in abandoning sites if slow or unavailable.
Forrester Research predicts that online shoppers will spend over $13 billion during the holiday season in the US, an increase of 20 per cent over 2003.
"Resilience has always been critical to operating a successful web infrastructure but over the last year the stakes have got a lot higher," commented Steve Palmer, VP Marketing at Zeus Technology. "This research shows that the combination of massive increases in traffic and zero tolerance of downtime adds up to a major problem for network managers. This is particularly true of the critical Christmas season, with major websites taking an average of £1.5 million ($2.8 million) per day in orders. This equates to a loss of £62,500 ($120,000) per hour of downtime - not a Merry Christmas for retailers."
As well as greater website activity (78 per cent of those surveyed), other factors increasing traffic included web services implementations (60 per cent), email (57 per cent) and SSL-encrypted traffic (43 per cent).
In order to safeguard their Internet infrastructures 51 per cent of organisations have had to invest to cope with growth. 79 per cent of organizations have installed back up units, with others investing in new, application-centric solutions.
To meet this need Zeus Technology has launched Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager v3.0, the next-generation traffic management, security and optimization solution which provides centralized control and resilience of application traffic and ensures seamless interaction between web enabled services. Zeus Extensible Traffic Manager (ZXTM) leads the way in intelligent application-centric traffic management, enabling users to enhance their systems flexibly, rapidly and in line with the needs of the business. More information on ZXTM v3.0 is available.
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