By Prakash Krishnamoorthy, Director – India, HPE Aruba Networking
Walk into any retail store today and one can probably notice one or more IoT devices deployed like handheld POS systems and numerous modern security tools. However, what’s commonly missed is the amount of data being processed due to the digital transformation that retailers have experienced in recent years. In fact, as per a joint report by Deloitte and the Retailers Association of India (RAI), notable trends are driving the significance of retail technologies, such as the adoption of IoT and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is poised to scale supply chain efficiency, while the integration of these technologies will enhance omnichannel experiences.
As a consequence, there has been a growing emphasis on the modernisation of data centers to achieve a streamlined and integrated approach to IT operations. No longer defined by physical facilities, data centers have become a core part of an infrastructure that needs to be resilient, flexible, and secure. Shifting from a centralised to a distributed modern edge-to-cloud data center network can benefit retail organisations and their customers while aligning to a few common industry significances:
1. Prioritising customer loyalty – Customers expect real-time information, personalisation, and choice,
whether they’re browsing, buying, or making a return. Having the right data is essential to obtaining a 360° view of the customer and their preferences. The first step in being able to derive these types of insights is having the right infrastructure in place to collect, store, and segment the data effectively, in a non-evasive manner.
2. Securing sensitive data – As the retail sector undergoes digital transformation, it also experiences an
unfortunate rise in diverse cyber-security threats. Retailers need to ensure point-of-sale, scanners, IoT and other devices are secure in real-time with role-based policies across corporate, store, and warehouse locations. Combined with AI, retailers can take a more proactive approach and respond to potential incidents in real time.
3. Increasing operational efficiency – With evolving IoT devices, increased security threats, and ever–
changing customer expectations, retailers need to be able to respond quickly to risks at all levels. The risk of a system outage could jeopardize anything from supply to frontline workforce tools. The ability of a retailer’s data centre to align with strategic innovation can help retailers seamlessly meet the operational demands of today’s digital era. That’s where data center network solutions can help retailers evolve from sprawling, expensive legacy systems to a unified, efficient data centre.
Distributed architecture
Retailers have enough to worry about with the industry landscape rapidly changing and more data than ever at their fingertips. Distributed architectures implement software-defined services that improve security posture, optimise network performance, and simplify network provisioning by distributing intelligence closer to workloads.
Intrinsic security
It’s becoming infinitely more difficult for retailers to secure data and see into blind spots as data grows
and sprawls across on-prem and cloud footprints. With switches that provide built-in security capabilities, customers can apply policies consistently across users and workloads. Dynamic segmentation reduces the risk exposure associated with east-west traffic patterns—which traditional approaches of physically separating network traffic cannot.
Unified orchestration
Innovations around cloud-based orchestration offer a single pane of glass for multi-site, multi-geography
branch, campus, and data center network management. This advantage proves invaluable for organisations with limited technical resources by eliminating the requirement to staff and fund dedicated on-site IT resources. Moreover, overall end-to-end network and security policies can be vastly simplified with consistent policies that span various locations and network fabrics, with stateful services that are delivered inline, at scale, with wire-rate performance, and critical mission workloads managed securely. Applying advanced intelligence to modernise data center operations, retailers can overcome the challenges of inefficient, costly, and complex legacy systems by making the transition to a unified, intelligent, and automated data center network.
Retail’s digital transformation is underway, and with it, the need to address ever-increasing data volumes that must be processed, secured, and analyzed. The right data center solutions can give retailers full visibility and confidence that each application gets the right mix of network services and security. Thus, empowering them to enhance operational efficiency, deliver superior customer experiences, and drive business growth in an increasingly competitive market.
