(MENAFN- Procre8) By: Christian Reilly, Field CTO, Cloudflare

The holiday season remains a make-or-break period for most retailers. Purchases in November and December often comprise about 19% of total annual sales. And a growing volume is happening online: Salesforce reported that online sales reached an all-time high of $1.2 trillion globally in 2024.

As mobile shopping continues to dominate — about 69% of global online purchases in 2024 were made via mobile devices — retailers need their sites to be fast, secure, and always available. Meanwhile, cybercriminals are becoming more sophisticated, leveraging AI to power phishing, credential stuffing, bots, DDoS, and ransomware attacks that target ecommerce platforms.

This is why retailers must have a comprehensive holiday readiness strategy that ensures performance, availability, and security.

1. Understand the Challenges

Availability and Performance
Retailers must ensure their websites, mobile apps, APIs, and payment systems perform seamlessly under heavy load. Latency is costly — One recent study showed that pages that take more than four seconds to load experience a bounce rate of 63%. Traffic surges can be massive: Requests to ecommerce sites (from legitimate shoppers) reached 405 billion on Black Friday 2024, according to data analyzed by Cloudflare.

Resource Constraints
IT and security teams are expected to deliver personalized omnichannel experiences while managing higher volumes and tighter budgets. Many struggle with scale, complexity, and evolving threats.

New Cybersecurity Threats
Attackers are using AI to create realistic phishing, deepfakes to deceive employees, bots to scrape pricing data and commit fraud, and ransomware that adjusts its tactics autonomously.

2. Strengthen Security with a Unified Platform

Retailers benefit from a unified platform that integrates performance, infrastructure scaling, and advanced security instead of managing multiple tools.

Defending Against Bots
Malicious bots can scrape data, steal credentials, or execute fake transactions. An effective bot management solution distinguishes between good and bad bots and blocks harmful activity without affecting legitimate customers.

Handling DDoS Attacks
DDoS attacks can flood networks with terabits of traffic per second. A cloud-based defense with a global network backbone is essential to absorb such attacks while keeping services online.

Ransomware and Credential Attacks
Phishing remains a leading cause of breaches. Compromised credentials allow attackers to move laterally within systems. Multi-factor authentication, zero-trust architectures, and robust email security are key defences.

Data Protection
Compliance with PCI DSS and other regulations requires encryption, client-side attack prevention, and data-loss prevention (DLP). Network segmentation further limits the impact of breaches.

3. Deliver Omnichannel Experiences, Efficiently

Shoppers today move seamlessly between mobile, web, and in-store experiences. Retailers need consistent, responsive performance across all touchpoints.

Scalable Infrastructure
Ahead of the holiday surge, businesses should prepare to scale servers, apps, APIs, and services rapidly. Cloud platforms with auto-scaling capabilities help maintain performance during traffic spikes.

API-first and Developer Productivity
Modern retail relies on connected systems and APIs linking websites, apps, and in-store platforms. APIs enable innovation but are increasingly targeted by attackers. Securing them is essential. The right platform supports developers to create personalized experiences and scale safely.

Unified Vendor Ecosystem
Using too many independent tools creates integration challenges, security gaps, and higher costs. A unified platform simplifies management and improves visibility across security and performance.

4. Are You Ready for the Winter Surge?

Being prepared means more than scaling infrastructure. It means integrating performance, security, and experience into one cohesive stack — before the busiest shopping weeks begin.

Key questions for retailers:
• Can your ecommerce site handle major traffic surges without slowing or crashing?
• Are your defenses ready for bots, DDoS, ransomware, and API attacks?
• Do customers enjoy a seamless experience across mobile, web, and store channels?
• Are your teams equipped to respond quickly and efficiently with minimal vendor complexity?

If any of these answers are uncertain, now is the time to act.

The Bottom Line
The holiday season is make-or-break for retailers. With record sales volumes, mobile dominance, and increasingly sophisticated threats, readiness requires a complete approach — performance, availability, and security.

By adopting a unified, cloud-native platform that scales and defends your infrastructure while empowering your developers, you can turn the holiday surge into an opportunity for growth.
With the right preparation, your business won’t just survive the rush — it will thrive.

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