RETAIL

Building a Resilient Retail Network

Retailers need a reliable network in order to ensure business continuity. Facing a variety of unique challenges that arise from maintaining distributed networks, retail organizations can experience irreparable damages during an outage – the average cost being $5,600 per minute.

To ensure customer retention, lessen security risks and ensure revenue flow, retailers need a high-speed resilient network. Adapting to the increasingly digital influence in the industry, retailers are connecting more IoT devices such as POS stations, security cameras and handheld devices to services in the cloud – these need a network safeguard.

Opengear’s proven solutions ensure always-on network resilience and maximum uptime for your retail network. Used by some of the world’s largest retail brands, these are easy and quick to deploy, simple to manage, and scalable to thousands of stores.

To learn more about building resilient retail networks, see our solution overview sheet.

Identifying Outage Causes

To maximize the value of each store, retailers understand needing to streamline operations with new applications and for optimal use, these assets are hosted at the edge. Although computing at the edge has many benefits such as improving logistics, ensuring compliance and reducing costs, it also can increase the possibility of outages.

Outages can be caused for a variety of reasons ranging from ISP carrier issues to fiber cuts and human error. Due to the increasing complexity of these elements, if administrators don’t have the proper Smart Out-of-Band (Smart OOB™) solution in place, they are challenged to diagnose the issue without visibility of the full network. This can extend downtime and result with thousands of dollars in damages for a retailer.

Get more information on retail specific network solutions by reading our infographic.

Deploying Smart Solutions in Retail

Across the globe retailers are already deploying Opengear solutions for their distributed networks – including one of the largest commerce organizations in the world. To reduce costs and ensure secure connections for their hundreds of distributed sites, they chose to deploy SD-WAN. Understanding the potential points of failure created during these deployments, the retailer chose a combination of Opengear appliances and Lighthouse software that could identify issues, remediate them remotely and provide full network visibility if a disruption occurs.

Watch this video to learn about the specific Opengear solutions this retailer chose to enable always-on network availability, reduce downtime, lower operational costs and improve customer retention.

Understanding Issues With The Last Mile

Cloud services and SD-WAN have become a core component of many retail organizations. Although connectivity has continually improved, a weakness that seems to persist is the last mile. The final segment of the WAN network that connects everything from retail stores to data distribution outlets to SD-WAN and cloud services is the last mile. Considered the weakest link in connectivity, all the traffic for a store, branch or distribution center is funneled through single links and their bandwidth limits the amount of data transmitted to an ISP.

Retail organizations that want to protect their enterprise against the last mile need a solution that provides additional bandwidth and availability. To learn how to build a resilient retail network, download our white paper today!