While Black Friday has, in recent years, bled into Cyber Monday; for the 2020 season we’re not focussed on an advertised day or two of deals. Instead, we’re suggesting that you batten down the hatches and scale up your monitoring for ‘Cyber Season’ because physical retail locations closing for major sale days is just the first wave.

Collection doesn’t equal detection. When your eyeballs are pulsing from the stress of looking at multiple screens, logs, performance metrics, and messages of interpretation from your team; it’s challenging not to experience your own personal system overload. “Thinking too much leads to paralysis by analysis.

George Romero’s zombie classic, Dawn of the Dead, is the perfect analogy for a lot like the DevOps experience. Your cluster of services is like your Monroeville Mall. Your safe haven where you live and work for years on end, toiling away at survival. But who are the zombies? The answer isn’t always clear when you’re busy chasing down alerts at 2 AM.

It’s always in the early dawn hours – an SMS alert on your phone forces you to drag up your eyelids and look at a text: your site traffic has surpassed its usual threshold. You start to run through the possibilities as you drift off in search of a few more minutes of sleep but traffic keeps rapidly increasing and your brain jumps to a conclusion…could it be a DDoS Attack?

We once asked whether it was possible to remain both incompetent and in business. We concluded that while incompetency is not a desirable trait, it is surprisingly possible to remain in business for a fairly short while. What we have learned in Q3 is that complacency allows internet downtime to fester. Our Destimate for Q3 of 2020 is fairly high. We expect the average business with monitoring and minimal IT resources stand to lose 17.4% of revenue on the conservative side, and as much as 22.35%.