Have you ever heard this quote from Michael Caine, “Be like a duck. Calm on the surface, but always paddling like the dickens underneath”? That’s sort of what happens with tech during the holiday season, which really kicks off around the world around this time of year and runs until mid-January (when the gift returns slowly stop coming in …).

When you shop, call your family, use Zoom or Teams for personal use and work, all of this adds considerable load to an enterprise network.

Okay, so network traffic goes up during the holiday season. Doesn’t that suggest the number of crashes should go up? Shouldn’t the system break?

But we rarely experience that, right? Why is that?

As Extreme’s Bill Lundgren explains in the video above, while there’s a mighty surge in network usage from now through the new year, it’s the power of the Cloud that catches the overflow and scales on-demand. Cloud application updates stop behind the scenes and companies can go into a mode where they focus on execution while ensuring the corporate network remains as stable as possible. As a result, the shopping masses that IT types call end-users, retailers call customers, and who the rest of us call people, well, they can go about their lives and buy presents for Aunt Mary Lou or whoever they might like.

So, in the rare chance you are dealing with an overloaded system, it’s entirely likely you’re shopping or Zooming somewhere that isn’t in the Cloud. And your network is getting a little stressed as a result.

This is one of the most compelling elements of working in tech: What occurs behind the scenes is often designed to convince us that nothing is happening behind the scenes. But in reality? It’s like being backstage at Broadway. There’s the magic behind the curtain, as well as in front. Happy holidays!