There's been plenty of hype this morning about Black Friday and this is only set to continue on Monday when Cyber Monday hits.

On Cyber Monday, the online retail environment will be confronted by a deluge of extra traffic, it is the biggest online retail day of the year. On Cyber Monday last year, the Adobe Digital Index showed online consumers spent $2.29 billion, and retail websites saw a 23% rise in visitor traffic. These statistics not only show the scale of Cyber Monday, but also the popularity amongst retailers and consumers.

Enter Mr Linsell:

“With the arrival of Cyber Monday, Internet retailers need to be prepared for a lot of extra traffic! Since the first Cyber Monday in 2006, sales have increased each year - last year’s event saw an extra 112 million hits to retail websites, generating sales of over £1.46 billion.

Cyber Monday has become as much a part of our holiday season as blockbuster repeats and Turkey. Yet on the most intense period of retail activity of the year, some retailers will no doubt be caught out by the increased volumes of traffic to their sites. The impact to their revenues and overall brand perception of missing this important shopping period is significant, so it pays to be prepared.

What these retailers really need is a managed service provider (MSP) to deliver a highly flexible and scalable cloud infrastructure to support such enormous peaks in traffic. Scalability and availability is central to online retailers to sustain business operations during busy periods. Mitigation/ prevention of security vulnerabilities should also be heightened, ranging from DDoS mitigation through to proactive security/ incident management – ensuring online retail is reliable and available. An MSP that understands its customer’s business needs is vital to retailers to safeguard online sales opportunities now and in the future”.