It’s about that time of year when we start thinking about holiday shopping. Now, this can be a both thrilling time and dreadful task as the holiday shopping season seems to begin earlier each year. You’re probably thinking: How can I save money during the most expensive time of year, without having to travel to a million stores?” Well, retailers have made it more convenient and inexpensive than ever with Cyber Monday. According to comScore, 2015 Cyber Monday reached $2.28 billion in desktop online spending, up 12 percent versus the year prior, representing the heaviest online spending day in history. 

With this inevitable period of high demand, it’s vital for those e-tailers to ensure their IT infrastructure is able to handle the influx of buyers and sales. 

Here are just two examples that highlight how cloud is particularly “in fashion” this time of year: 

ASOS, an online-only fashion and beauty business, was struggling to keep up with the pace of high demands within IT.Their existing testing and development systems simply didn’t have the ability to support this number of environments necessary to meet the demand. ASOS came to the conclusion that a cloud solution would provide them the flexibility they needed. ASOS leveraged the expertise and cloud solutions of Navisite to support their Fashion Finder and Marketplace. With innovative cloud solutions in place, ASOS posted a 38 percent increase in global sales and a 37 percent increase in sales in the UK. In addition, ASOS has continued to develop their online platform, which enables the company to deliver an innovative and award-winning fashion offering to its clients. By moving to the cloud, ASOS reduced the time to move from testing to production from 16 weeks to two days—allowing them to quickly transition with little impact on clients.

Fashion GPS, a company that designs digital solutions for the fashion industry, needed the ability to move valuable client data to secure colocation service, in a quick and reliable way.In addition, they needed high security for items like circulating samples and prototypes between designers and editors. During fashion show season, Fashion GPS has extremely high demands, which they needed a solution to help with. Navisite helped to provide a colocation solution to securely store their data. As a result, the data Fashion GPS holds on behalf of clients is secure and they have the ability to deliver a consistent, reliable and robust service to clients, even during their busiest periods. Furthermore, one of Fashion GPS’ largest clients has seen up to 50 percent improvement in processing speeds with data upload speeds increasing by over 80 percent.

Every industry has it’s “busy season” and for online retailers, they are about to experience peak sales like no other time of the year. With agile cloud solutions in place, they can manage all of the traffic and orders to their sites, so clients can shop with ease. Watch out Black Friday, Cyber Monday is coming to take the crown for the most shopped day of the holiday season—and the best part? No crowds! 

Want to keep up with the speed of business all year round? Learn how to choose the right cloud provider to achieve the cost savings and agility that the cloud can deliver.