At the end of the year, holiday shopping, financial events, last-minute business deadlines and even surges in entertainment consumption can put enormous strain on digital systems. For tech teams, October is a critical window to tune, test and prepare systems before demand surges hit.
Below, members of Forbes Technology Council share strategies that go beyond simply adding servers. From failover drills to “chaos engineering” simulations, these steps help ensure customers experience seamless service instead of frustrating delays and outages during peak season.
1. Conduct Dry Runs And Contingency Checks
Preparedness extends beyond technology. Conduct dry runs, stress tests and contingency checks. Ensure behind-the-scenes personnel maintain clear playbooks, escalation paths and backup plans. Even when systems scale effectively, organizational readiness ultimately determines whether seasonal surges result in smooth operations or disruptions. – Satish Natarajan, DispatchTrack
2. Run Cross-Functional Chaos Drills
Retail teams can use October to stress-test for peak season with cross-functional “chaos drills,” pushing their tech stack’s limits before customers do. These drills reveal what breaks under surging sales, failed syncs and support backlogs. The goal isn’t to avoid every failure, but to build resilience and practice rapid recovery. – Kristjan Vilosius, Katana Cloud Inventory
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3. Simulate High Traffic Across Channels
Retail’s high season hits during the holidays—October through December. Retailers need to prepare for surges not only in stores, but also online. Simulating high levels of traffic on a website or at the register will help prepare staff for possible hiccups. These proactive strategies create a seamless shopping experience for the customer during seasonal chaos, which means they’ll return the rest of the year. – Brett Beveridge, The Revenue Optimization Companies (T-ROC Global)
4. Test Real Failover Scenarios
Tech teams should test real failover, not just traffic spikes. Pull a server, cut a router or break an API and watch how the system responds. The goal is to confirm that both tools and people can recover quickly before holiday demand puts everything on the line. – Erick Grau, Chibitek
5. Run A Pre-Holiday ‘Game Day’
In October, run a pre-holiday “game day”: In a production-like environment, simulate two to three times your forecasted peak, and inject failures. Verify autoscaling, rate limits, queues and failover. Fix top bottlenecks. Finalize runbooks and on-call schedules, and lock a change freeze for the surge window. – Vlad Malanin, SpeedSize
6. Perform Stress Tests Under Peak Traffic Conditions
It’s always good to run stress tests that mimic peak traffic. This helps catch hidden bottlenecks that appear under pressure early on and gives teams time to fix them. Instead of scrambling to patch problems during peak demand, they can carefully implement upgrades and retest everything under controlled conditions. – Roman Eloshvili, XData Group
7. Simulate Worst-Case Surge Scenarios
In October, tech teams should run full-scale chaos and load simulations that mimic worst-case seasonal surge scenarios—not just average expectations. Too many companies stress-test systems in isolated environments or under ideal conditions. – Alex ZAP Chernyak, ZAPTEST
8. Baseline And Monitor Performance
The objective is to ensure that the last person impacted by a performance flaw is the customer. By baselining performance capabilities, tech teams can accurately measure the impact of any updates on performance improvement before they go live. In addition, utilizing scalable platforms ensures a high percentage of uptime and low latency, even throughout surges. – Martin Taylor, Content Guru
9. Test DR And Backup Plans
Test system redundancy, as well as disaster recovery and backup plans. Yes, most IT systems have at least some of this built in. But when was the last time they were tested? Go pull the power cord of a server, kill a network router or two, and watch how the applications react. Do they keep on running? If downtime is a result, it’s better to know now than on December 21st. – Bruce Kornfeld, StorMagic
10. Prepare For AI Bot Traffic
AI bots accounted for 51% of all Web traffic in 2024. To prepare for seasonal surges, brands need to be thinking about bot experience, how bots access their site and how prepared they are to handle an increase in bot visits. Preparation comes from building out an AI governance plan that ensures the way AI platforms interact with your content matches your company’s strategy. – Adrien Menard, Botify
11. Pressure-Test Systems And CX Operations
You can’t go into the end of the year hoping your systems hold. October is the time to pressure-test them and bring in partners who can scale with you. Stress-test your CX ops, and lock in flexible coverage, AI tools that enable human agents, and a team that can handle surges now, so December isn’t spent apologizing to angry customers. – Craig Crisler, SupportNinja
12. Review Cloud Capacity And Auto-Scaling Policies
It’s all about proactive scaling: Review your cloud capacity and auto-scaling policies now, not when your metrics are spiking like a viral meme. Don’t wait for chaos—make sure your infrastructure flexes automatically, keeping even the wildest rush hour as smooth as butter. – Andrew Siemer, Inventive
13. Deploy AI-Powered Voice Agents
In a contact center, if you’re failing to plan for seasonal surges, you’re planning to fail. AI-powered voice agents can be the efficiency boost contact centers need to help curtail many surge-time challenges. They can fully handle FAQs or simple requests, dramatically lowering call volumes and freeing up human agents to tackle more complex or sensitive issues. – Nikola Mrksic, PolyAI
14. Run Full-Scale Operational Stress Tests
Initiate a full-scale operational stress test and failover drill in October. This ensures critical systems, cloud infrastructure and response teams are ready for peak loads, minimizing disruption risk and ensuring seamless customer experiences across all sectors. – Lori Schafer, Digital Wave Technology
15. Simulate Peak Traffic On A Full Production Replica
To prepare for seasonal surges, tech teams should run comprehensive load and stress tests on a full production replica. Simulating peak traffic helps uncover bottlenecks, tune capacity and harden resilience. By addressing issues early, companies in digital banking, retail, healthcare, software as a service, or gaming can protect revenue and customer trust and deliver seamless experiences when demand spikes. – Deep Varma, Alkami
16. Expect Something To Break
Conduct comprehensive failure simulation exercises that deliberately break different system components to understand exactly where and how the system fails under extreme load. This involves stress-testing individual services beyond their breaking points and documenting the specific failure modes and recovery procedures for each critical component. – Kevin Cushnie, MC Systems
17. Do A Full ‘Surge Rehearsal’
Do a “surge rehearsal”: In a production-like clone, replay last year’s peak traffic with autoscaling on, chaos enabled and the on-call team live. Measure time-to-recover and fix the top bottleneck. One rehearsal in October can prevent a midnight meltdown in November. – Margarita Simonova, ILoveMyQA
18. Automate As Many Retail Processes As Possible
To prepare for peak season, retailers should automate as many manual processes as possible—for example, inventory syncing across channels, order routing, shipping allocation, and pick and pack scenarios. Your teams need to be able scale really quickly to ensure resilience during this period of significant demand spike. – Georgia Leybourne, Linnworks
19. Test Human Responses Alongside Systems
In October, don’t just test systems—test humans, continually (and not just with a cyber awareness challenge). Run live “all hands” surge simulations that stress both tech and response teams. The goal is to validate how quickly engineers, support personnel and business units communicate and then recover under pressure. A coordinated team drill can often prevent more disruption than any code tweak alone could. – Dan Sorensen
20. Route Production Traffic Through ‘Shadow’ Services
In October, route a small slice of real production traffic through “shadow” services running in parallel. This exposes scaling gaps, misconfigurations and/or query slowdowns under live conditions without the risk of disruptions for customers. It’s a low-risk rehearsal that validates readiness while giving the team weeks to optimize before the true surge hits. – Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen Infotech