Scaling PCI & PII Security the Right Way: How to Prepare for Black Friday
Is your data infrastructure ready to handle peak traffic in 2025?
Global e-commerce is expected to surpass $6.8 Trillion in 2025 to serve 2.77 billion online shoppers. This extraordinary scale demands robust security infrastructure that can protect sensitive data management at every touchpoint. When peak traffic hits, security and payments infrastructure must scale seamlessly, and perform flawlessly. Every second of downtime during peak traffic doesn't just mean lost transactions—it means lost customer trust and millions in revenue.
Three fundamental scenarios technical leaders must prepare for:
- Can your infrastructure handle 3x normal load without failing?
- What happens when your payment processor goes down?
- How can you protect customer PII across the entire payment stack?
Let's examine how leading e-commerce companies answered these questions during 2024's biggest test of e-commerce infrastructure.
Lessons from BFCM 2024: Scale meets Security
Leading companies transformed their payment infrastructure to meet Black Friday / Cyber Monday’s (BFCM's) demanding requirements during retail's biggest test of 2024. Their engineering leaders also successfully managed security threats, and maintained compliance across jurisdictions. The stakes were clear: Even a five-minute outage during peak hours meant millions in lost revenue, thousands of failed transactions and damaged customer trust.
Global online sales hit a record $1.2 trillion, and engineering teams thrived through unprecedented challenges of scale, speed, and data security.
The numbers tell the story. During BFCM:
- $41 billion spent by U.S. consumers online
- $31 billion processed through Stripe globally
- $11.5 billion in global sales from merchants on Shopify
- 99.8 million HTTP requests per second
The challenge extends beyond domestic markets: cross-border payment infrastructure processed millions of international transactions, each requiring sophisticated data privacy protection.
But beyond these headline numbers lurked a darker reality. Cyber Week saw a 41% surge in DDoS attacks compared to the previous week. With 71% of consumers ready to abandon companies that mishandle their data, and breaches now costing an average of $9.36 million, the stakes have never been higher.
These numbers reveal more than scale—they expose critical vulnerabilities in traditional security infrastructure.
The Mandate: Secure Sensitive PCI and PII Data at Scale
Behind every successful BFCM season is an engineering team that spent months meticulously preparing. Starting in the summer and all through the fall, technical teams work relentlessly to fortify their infrastructure. While marketing teams plan promotions, engineering teams battle-test their systems for extreme loads of retail's busiest week.
Technical leaders face four concurrent issues while architecting a modern e-commerce infrastructure stack:
- Scaling infrastructure for peak loads ⮕ Solved by Cloudflare
- Ensuring millions of seamless payments ⮕ Solved by Stripe
- Protecting sensitive customer data ⮕ ?
- Maintaining compliance across jurisdictions ⮕ ?
But there's a hidden risk in this stack: vendor dependency. What happens when your payment processor goes down during peak traffic? Or if your KYC service fails? During BFCM, a single vendor outage can cost millions in lost revenue.
Modern e-commerce infrastructure requires multiple specialized solutions, but it also demands redundancy for essential services. Traditional security approaches fall short during these peak events. Adding more security layers often means sacrificing performance – a trade-off most companies can't afford during their highest-revenue weekend.
So, what's the right approach to securing sensitive customer data while maintaining control of your infrastructure?
Let’s look at what leading innovators across fintech and e-commerce achieved during the last Black Friday and Cyber Monday in 2024.
How Leading Retailers Protect Customer Data
BFCM 2024 pushed e-commerce and payments infrastructure to its limits. The Skyflow Data Privacy Vault saw a 270% spike in API calls and a 373% jump in Data API usage from 2023 levels – all while maintaining sub-100ms latency. Here's how innovative companies leveraged this performance to protect sensitive data at scale:
European Fintech Unicorn - processing millions in BNPL transactions
After experiencing payment processor outages during peak traffic, a leading European Buy Now Pay Later provider faced a difficult choice: switch to another single provider and risk similar outages, maintain multiple payment processors, or build their own solution. Building in-house would mean high ongoing maintenance costs. Skyflow offered a better path: a secure data privacy infrastructure that could handle multiple payment providers while protecting both credit card data and customer PII. This solution not only solved their redundancy challenge but also strengthened their overall data security posture.
Result: Zero outages during peak events since implementation, including record-breaking BFCM seasons.
Next-generation Payment Orchestrator - handling cross-border flows
A global payment orchestration platform needed to handle cross-border transactions across multiple jurisdictions, each with unique compliance requirements. They chose Skyflow to maintain local data residency while providing seamless payment flows. Since implementation, they've continuously expanded their usage: onboarding new merchants, implementing additional privacy features, and migrating nearly a million records from legacy payment systems.
Result: Their focus on flexible architecture has paid off: zero outages during peak events while supporting rapid global expansion.
Cloud-native retail platform - serving global enterprise brands
An enterprise retail platform serving global brands needed more than just secure infrastructure—they needed a competitive edge in winning enterprise contracts. By implementing Skyflow's data privacy vault, they transformed data security from a compliance checkbox into a compelling business advantage. Their ability to guarantee true data residency, coupled with bulletproof security features, helped them win major retail contracts across Europe and Asia. Technical teams protected customer PII across multiple brands and regions while maintaining consistent performance, even during peak sales events.
Result: Zero outages during peak events since implementation, enabling them to win and retain major enterprise contracts worldwide.
What’s the common thread above?
These success stories reveal a crucial insight: Leading companies aren't just protecting data—they're transforming a privacy-by-design mindset into a competitive advantage. Industry leaders across the globe—from America's largest retailers to European fintech unicorns to India's fastest-growing e-commerce platforms—trust this emerging data privacy vault architecture approach to secure their customers' sensitive data.
Looking Ahead: Preparing for 2025 Peak Season
The numbers are clear: 2024 shattered all records. U.S. consumers spent $282 billion online (Salesforce) in the holiday season from November to December. 2025 promises even more!
Technical leaders in different industries are already laying the groundwork for their next peak traffic periods of 2025. This record forecast demands e-commerce and payment infrastructure that automatically scales while maintaining security and simplifying compliance. Skyflow is expanding customer capabilities in e-commerce, fintech, travel, and healthcare industries to meet these growing demands, fueled by the lessons learned during this year's record-breaking season.
Grateful to our customers who trusted us during their most crucial business moments. Their partnership and feedback helped us build a more resilient platform. Together, we achieved zero downtime during peak events while continuously improving our infrastructure. Honored to be a core component of their engineering stack.
Ready to secure your peak traffic events?
Schedule a technical deep dive to learn how Skyflow can help your team to:
- Protect sensitive data at scale
- Maintain performance during peak loads
- Ensure compliance across regions
- Prepare for your next peak traffic events in 2025
Learn how innovative fintech and e-commerce companies secure sensitive data while scaling.
