If you or your team are responsible for running or delivery the IT for a retail store or chain today - the busiest shopping day of the year - the last thing you is urgent phone call only to be told that the point of sales (POS) system is down at one of your stores.

With shoppers lining up for today's Black Friday deals, bargains or the boxing day rush – you know that these sales make the difference between profit and loss, especially with so much traffic and sales now online!

With panic on hand about just what has happened - you ask your branch manager, "When were the DR plans last tested?" A long pause followed by “umm….” confirms your fears. With little optimism, you instruct the branch manager to implement the DR plans.

What are you talking about – this won’t happen
Well, this might sound a bit last decade and bit extreme  - but it does illustrate the impact that an IT Failure can have on a retail store and your sales!

Today’s retail store environments are heavily reliant on IT (in store servers, WAN connectivity, POS systems, wired and wireless networks) – they are highly critical and there are huge risks and costs associated with any kind of downtime.

Imagine even a less extreme scenario where the POS fails and checkout attendants need to switch to a manual or paper-based process - A US study last year found that 50% of customers who had to wait in line for longer than 5 minutes would avoid that retailer or brand in the future. Yet like many branches, retail shops often lack the protection and DR plans that “online only” businesses have to keep them up and running at critical times.

For your business to survive – this needs to change!

Protecting your Retail Stores from IT Failure and Risk
Many leading retail businesses are now taking “store IT” assets and turning them from a liability to a point of competitive advantage.

Here we look at how with Riverbed SteelFusion®, branch office consolidation and WAN acceleration technologies can help you modernize, protect and improve the retail IT environment:

1) Optimise those in-store applications.  As the consumer retail experience becomes ever more digital, in-store apps drive revenue and operations. Riverbed SteelFusion can help by enabling businesses to centralise corporate applications such as Microsoft Exchange and SharePoint while delivering a fast and consistent experience to remote users/stores. Other applications such as Customer-facing and backroom apps including inventory and time management that “need” to run locally can be hosted directly on the SteelFusion platform. Riverbed SteelFusion ensures continuous operations of your store despite network outages with the added benefit of letting you store and manage servers and data centrally, transforming how you provision, protect, and recover services.

2) Streamline Point of Sale systems With the most critical application in the retail store is the point-of-sale terminal. With SteelFusion, its possible to eliminates the need for a dedicated POS server. The POS servers can be run locally on SteelFusion to eliminate / remove the cost of keeping local servers/storage locally while providing additional security by encrypting any and all customer data. SteelFusion’s data centralisation provides near-real time customer data meaning its always available centrally in the data centre for analysis.

3) Empower Your Digital Signage.  You will know that a critical component of a modern in-store experience is the use of digital signage for promotions, advertising, content, and pricing. Many of these today need a dedicated media server running in the back room. Because SteelFusion eliminates the need for the dedicated infrastructure that powers the digital signage, it means you can now run the media engine on the converged appliance to cut costs. What’s more, the built-in WAN optimisation can optimize and pre-populate video content, meaning a better experience in store.

4) Monitor customer experiences.  One of things asked by marketing and finance is “how do you monitor the experience of customers using new in-store applications?”.  The question is are you meeting your internal SLAs with these apps? SteelFusion can provide remote application and traffic monitoring, which when coupled with Riverbed SteelCentral performance management can provide you with in-depth monitoring of transactions, the user experience, and your overall infrastructure performance.

5) Breakout customer Wi-Fi traffic. One of the emerging aspects of the modern retail store is customer Wi-Fi and the growing expectation that this will just be available for free. By utilising Riverbed SteelFusion you can now eliminate the need to back haul internet traffic across your WAN or MPLS. Riverbed SteelFusion’s built-in WAN optimisation with Path Selection enables you to send Wi-Fi traffic – consumer or corporate – directly to the Internet. With SteelFusion you can easily leverage lost-cost Internet links such as ADSL and reduce the cost of bandwidth at each store location by more than 5 fold.

6) Eliminating stacks of IT and Storage and Back-up.  Most stores have stacks of IT - including file, print, domain controllers, and directory servers – not to mention back-up servers and tape drives. Using Riverbed SteelFusion all of this can be eliminated – meaning you can get rid of the physical server and storage infrastructure associated with these servers by converging them onto the SteelFusion platform. All of this can be reduced down to a single 1U appliance. SteelFusion delivers power, cooling, and space savings and will easily fit into backrooms without complicated wiring.

What’s more, with all the data now stored in the Data Center (and projected back to the stores), you are also solving compliance, data integrity, security and performance issues.

Cisilion are proud to Riverbed Premier Plus Partners and Riverbed Authorized Support Partners. Contact us for more information, to book a demo or explore a Proof of Concept.