Redundancy Benefits in ecommerce integration A four-part overview on security, redundancy, and performance Brief Review of Part 1 In Part 1 of this series, we outlined and briefly discussed integration best practices: High level of security Redundancy High performance In part 2 we discussed the best practices of security. Here we will discuss the importance of redundancy and how it affects your business. What is Redundancy? Redundancy in business is generally considered a negative. This is based on the notion that redundancy creates excess expenses and inefficiencies. Typically, redundancies are stripped to make processes run more smoothly or reduce costs. In the world of ecommerce, however, redundancy is a great thing; it creates a competitive advantage. Redundant storage of customer information at different servers and different locations, each mirroring the other, is crucial so that if a complication arises, business can quickly resume. Redundancy can save a company in an emergency Redundancy Advantages Redundancy can aid your business by keeping the siite running in the midst of an outage or spikes in traffic. Downtime could lead to both revenue and customers. Typically the external facing side of your website is not behind the firewall, making it publicly available. Without redundancy, a data push will fail if the server is down. When the servers are restored, the data will not be accessible to the customer, or vice versa. This is because the data was only pushed once, and the system did not retry. For example, if a customer is placing an order and there is an internal issue behind the firewall, then the order will fail to be fulfilled by the company, resulting in a bad experience for the customer. Situations like this are highly detrimental in ecommerce. Many online buyers are unforgiving, resulting in a high dropout rate. Within a matter of minutes, dozens of customers could be lost. Redundancy addresses this issue by retrying a failed transfer until the transfer is successful. This gives you the assurance that all orders will be fulfilled. To do this, you will need to check to see if your transfer was received. A common model is a message queue or queuing model, which will explain transferring data. Redundancy can be viewed as a preventative measure. In the case of emergency, disaster can be avoided. This will ultimately be a huge contributing factor to scaling an ecommerce business. In part 4 of MS Dynamics GP integration Experts Best Practices, we will discuss best performance practices for ecommerce. Clarity Can Help If you would like to learn more about these practices or how we can help you apply them to your business, feel free to contact us today. We offer free consultations; our developers are ready to help.