We write this on our propitious Election Day 2016. And while this isn’t a political blog, as such, it’s no secret that happens in the worlds of government and politics has a direct effect on economies — and thus, on your customers and what they buy.
According to the National Retail Federation, many of this year’s holiday shoppers are waiting for the smoke to clear before they begin in earnest. In NRF’s own press release detailing highlights of this year’s survey, they quote their President and CEO, Matthew Shay. He says that “everywhere you turn — whether you’re picking up a newspaper or watching television — political advertisements are taking up ad space that retailers typically use to get holiday shopping on the minds of consumers across the country. Once the election has passed, we anticipate consumers will pull themselves out of the election doldrums and into the holiday spirit.”
How spirited? Well according to Consumerist’s report-on-the-report, the total will average $935.58. “That includes food, decorations, gifts, and cards for Christmas, Hanukkah, and Kwanzaa.”
With that sudden burst of activity, coming perhaps later this week, retailers will have a flood of transactions both on and off-line. And the IT protection firm Tripwire says they may not be ready for them. In a recent study of their own, they maintain that “retail IT professionals… were overconfident in their ability to quickly collect the data needed to identify and remediate a cyber attack. For example, seventy-one percent of the retail respondents believed they could detect configuration changes to endpoint devices on their organizations’ networks within hours. However, only fifty-one percent of the respondents knew exactly how long this process would take.”
And according to Verizon data used by Tripwire, “ninety-nine percent of successful system compromises occurred within hours and it took seventy-nine percent of retailers weeks or longer to discover that a breach had occurred. It also found that eighty-nine percent of breaches impacting the retail sector either had a financial or espionage motive, and sixty-four percent of retail data breaches involved point-of-sale intrusions.”
The upshot? Let AVPS help you get ready for the holiday hurry that’s just on the horizon! We can help you be more flexible, and you — and your customers — safer with all the digits and data coming your way.
