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Secure SASE for Retail
Retailers need to deliver a world-class experience for their customers in omni-channel ways to increase customer acquisitions and retentions.
Retailers have understood that new in-store technologies require robust and efficient connections to databases and applications in the cloud or a data center. In fact, Gartner Inc. reports that American-based retail service organizations have been the most aggressive early adopters of SD-WAN.
Retail as an industry is evolving as more and more connected devices and applications are making their way into brick and mortar environments to become future proof in an age of e-commerce and mobility. This trend will intensify in the next decade with workloads and customer analytics moving to the cloud and proliferation of the Internet of Things and low-code rapid application development. There’s a lot to be excited about in this new age of retail and adopting new technologies will be key to engaging with customers, streamline operations, and drive profits.
Modernizing the
Traditional Storefront
Most retail companies have multiple distributed stores, offices, and pop-up stores that require fast and reliable WAN connectivity to ensure customers and employees can efficiently work with their applications. A retail company’s ability to provide excellent customer service, and deliver the tools and support their employees need, can mean the difference between success and failure. But if a network outage or slow WAN connection frustrates customers and remote employees, they can lose revenue, and their brand can be at risk.
In other words, next-generation technologies require next-generation networks that are agile, cost-effective, and secure. Ensuring all store locations are connected continuously and networking effectively with head office, distribution, and the supply chain is paramount for retailers.
Employees and clients accessing applications from HQ data centers and cloud-hosted and SaaS-delivered sites need the apps to be fast, reliable, and secure. IT needs the WAN to be agile for easy deployment and management, and visibility to respond to dynamic network changes.
Traditional WAN Can
No Longer Keep Up
Today’s WANs need to be flexible, as they support discrete network architectures, including data traffic and wireless network traffic. Network connections need to support a retailer’s business objectives and mobile strategies while ensuring customer data is kept secure. The WAN also needs to be performing optimally to maintain a user quality of experience.
WANs are an integral part of a retailer’s communications, as applications and services depend upon them. MPLS circuits have often been used to support these applications and services. Yet, many retailers are now looking for MPLS alternatives to lower costs, simplify deployments for new stores, and increase bandwidth, while ensuring security, reliability, and performance.
SASE is Required for the Store of the Future
In the pursuit of a modern networking solution that can constantly support increased traffic volume, improve real-time monitoring, secure cloud connectivity, reduce operational costs, and catalyze digital growth, manufacturers are now turning to Secure SD-WAN.
The cost, time, and complexity of ripping out existing network infrastructure should not be necessary. An SD-WAN overlay can be cost-effective and deployed quickly, working in conjunction with legacy infrastructure.
Always Available Network
Secure SD-WAN offers the ability to aggregate multiple connections of any type, such as MPLS, broadband, wireless 4G, and LTE. By leveraging all available bandwidth, Secure SD-WAN makes the network agile enough to support more traffic volumes, and changing bandwidth demands. Doing so ensures continuous network availability and uninterrupted access to bandwidth-intensive AI and AR applications. Secure SD-WAN’s multiple transport link resilience also helps significantly cut down MPLS driven bandwidth costs.
High Application Performance
Secure SD-WAN architecture embeds application intelligence, enabling deep packet inspection by the network, beyond source and destination. It intelligently prioritizes application traffic based on business-intent policies and automatically directs them across the ideal transport route. This helps ensure mission-critical applications are always running smoothly, even during network outages, further improving application reliability and quality of experience. It also enables IT to spend less time dealing with network complexities and have more time and focus applied to business applications and services.
Centralized Management and Control
With centralized management and control, Secure SD-WAN dramatically simplifies WAN deployment and monitoring. Using simple, template-driven workflows, it eliminates tedious, error-prone configurations. With zero-touch deployment, IT can deploy patches, roll out policy updates, and strictly adhere to regulatory mandates across all branch locations from a single central orchestrator in one-go. Secure SD-WAN also offers deep granular visibility into applications, devices, and users to detect and fix any anomalies immediately. With a cloud-based Secure SD-WAN, manufacturers can quickly propagate or integrate new remote branches (in less than a month!), and simply plug-in to instantly connect to cloud services. By eliminating the need for manual visits to each branch site, Secure SD-WAN also saves substantial operational costs.
Secure Connectivity
Secure SD-WAN ’s segmentation enables IT to securely consolidate disparate physical environments into a single network. In doing so, they can classify applications based on business-intent and isolate sensitive data traffic from the regular corporate traffic for higher security and better regulatory compliance. Additionally, Secure SD-WAN also integrates end-to-end multi-layer security with best-of-breed features such as next-gen firewall, encryption, contextual awareness, and more. These deeper security capabilities allow manufacturers to steer away from data center backhauling of cloud traffic, and instead directly access cloud data and applications, without fearing security risks.