Black Friday and Cyber Monday are six months away. However distant this may seem, wheels  across the entire e-commerce industry have begun to turn, shifting their focus from projections and forecasts to tactical decisions on how to improve operations within budget.

With this in mind, here are a few things you can do right now to get ready for this year.

Although it’s not a traditional cybersecurity method, origin shielding lets you protect your origin server(s) from overload, ensuring high availability, performance uptime, and the ability to continue serving web and video traffic even when you experience a CDN outage. As we’ve seen with recent Fastly and Akamai CDN downtime events, the ability to create resilience and operate even in outage situations is a lifesaver. 

The 2020 Cyber Five shopping period broke all previous records for Cyber Five spending, coming in at about 38 billion USD (compared to 28.5 billion USD in 2019). This probably won’t come as a surprise as Black Friday and Cyber Monday moved almost entirely online, followed by record-breaking Amazon Prime Day and Singles Day preceding the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. Despite the continued onslaught of Covid-19, good news about successful vaccine trials and greater certainty of a peaceful transfer of power to the new president-elect in the United States contributed to a boost in consumer confidence. 

Public sector websites and apps may not get a lot of love because, for the most part, they are taken for granted by those who use and need them the most. These sites deliver the foundations of what societies and their populations need. Whether it’s garbage collection information, applying for unemployment payment benefits, or getting real-time information on a health crisis or natural disaster, governmental organizations bear numerous responsibilities and the public’s trust.