Overview
In today’s global marketplace, retail is more competitive than ever. The effective application of technology can cut the costs of doing business, open revenue opportunities, enhance customer service and widen profit margins, giving retailers a significant edge over their competition. However, if unsecured, this same technology can potentially expose retailers to loss of data, customers, revenues and reputation. A comprehensive approach to securing retail technology would enforce centrally-managed, policy-based controls over the entire retail network, including intranet, extranet and Internet traffic.
Optimally, a retail security solution should cost-effectively protect retail transactions, supply chain processes, business data integration, intellectual property and mission-critical resources, thereby freeing retailers to safely leverage technology for optimal profitability.
Competitive Advantages of Retail Technology
Retailers who take the greatest advantage of evolving technology stand to gain an edge over their competition through cutting costs, increasing revenue opportunities and being more responsive to their customers’ needs.
Gaining a Technology Edge in Cost Reduction
Emerging technologies have transformed inventory and supply chain automation. For example, radio frequency identification (RFID) has revolutionized warehouse management and store replenishment by eliminating errors, reducing labor costs, and streamlining processes. High-frequency RFID is extensively replacing barcode technology for tracking such items as jewelry, books, apparel and pharmaceuticals, while ultra-high frequency RFID is being applied to tracking case, pallet and shipping container information to enhance warehouse and transport management.
Similarly, supply intelligence technology, such as supply chain management software (SCMS) integrated over virtual private networks (VPNs), has greatly improved the cost-efficient transfer of goods by enabling analytical supply chain data to be shared over the Internet between producers, wholesalers, distributors and retailers. Such collaborative data helps produce more accurate sales and replenishments forecasts, resulting in significantly reduced inventory costs.
The ease of deploying, using and managing these new technologies also contribute significantly to overall cost reduction by optimizing the utilization of workforce resources to enhance productivity.
Gaining a Technology Edge in Revenues
Going forward, retailers will increasingly require the centralization and integration of demand intelligence technology in order to forecast demand accurately and maintain an appropriate category mix. The effective gathering and sharing of demand intelligence information will continue to be largely dependent upon point-of-sale (POS) data retrieval and systems integration.
However, as POS becomes further virtualized both in the store and on the Web, evolving technology will be critical in leveraging new methods of gathering and sharing demand intelligence to improve revenues.
Retailers will also find competitive advantage in revenue generation through applying VPN technology to collaborative merchandising by integrating with partner and sales channel information systems. Planning for global capacity in technology infrastructures will also be a necessary strategy. VPNs enable retailers to extend resource pools and expand their markets globally using more broadly-distributed business models, as well as over the Internet.
Gaining a Technology Edge in Customer Relationships
While it is often said that it costs five times more to acquire a new customer than to retain an existing one, building and maintaining solid customer relationships offer more than just cost reduction. A mere 5% improvement in customer retention can cause an increase in profitability of between 25% and 85% in terms of net present value depending on the industry. Interactive Web 2.0 technology is changing the face of B2B and B2C customer relations.
According to IDC, the online social community revolution will target traditional retailers hard. Web e-commerce, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) commerce, personalized portals, and mobile and remote POS technologies offer customers more purchase options. E-mail, instant messaging/chat, VPNs and VoIP provide new channels for customer support and feedback. Savvy retailers are using these new technologies to drive online branding and segmented online store offerings. Successful “e-tailers” like Amazon.com apply adaptive promotions based on Web shopping habits. Brick-and-mortar retailers are introducing in-store displays and shopping carts that directly interact with customers as they buy using wireless-based technology and sophisticated back-end databases.
To retain market share today, retailers must also be responsive to their customers’ social and cultural concerns as well, including such issues as identity and confidential data protection, workplace policy and practices and responsible energy consumption. IDC projects that “corporate social responsibility” and “green retail” will be among the top five priorities facing retailers.
Securing the Competitive Edge
None of these advantages in savings, revenues or customer retention can be effectively attained without securing the underlying technologies which provide them. Despite their advantages, emerging technologies tend to be prone to vulnerabilities that can be readily exploited by professional attackers. No longer individuals out for the prestige of showing they could compromise a system, today’s exploit developers are backed by profit-driven criminal organizations that seek to gather login credentials to financial sites for financial theft, identity theft and pump-and-dump stock schemes. In response to skyrocketing increases in malicious attacks, industry and government regulators require ever-tighter security in order for IT to meet compliance or else face stiff penalties.
PCI Compliance
Identity fraud has reached epidemic proportions. Theft of identity information has outpaced traditional robbery to become a multibillion-dollar phenomenon, widely perpetrated by professional criminals. According to a report by the Federal Trade Commission, the annual total loss to organizations and individual victims for all types of reported identity theft, including both new account and existing account fraud, runs upwards of $53 billion annually.
The PCI standard is broken down into twelve fundamental requirements that are designed to be relatively intuitive to follow:
- Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data
- Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters
- Protect stored data and do not store card and transaction data unnecessarily
- Encrypt transmission of cardholder data and sensitive information across public networks
- Use and regularly maintain secure systems and applications
- Develop and maintain secure systems and applications
- Restrict access to data by business need-to-know
- Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access
- Restrict physical access to cardholder data
- Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data
- Regularly test security systems and processes
- Establish and maintain high level security principles and procedures
These standard principles and mandated requirements offer an overall guideline for security best practices that should be applied not only to credit card information, but as part of any retail organization’s entire business data security program. Best practices warrant a defense-in-depth approach utilizing multiple layers for thorough protection, such as Unified Threat Management and Clean VPN.
In the past, retailers have had to settle for esoteric security solutions targeting single-point threats like viruses, spam and intrusions as they arose, often adding complexity and expense without corresponding value.
Today, security technology has evolved, and retailers demand simpler, well-engineered and cost-effective solutions. Unified Threat Management (UTM) firewall technology combines multiple security features into a single platform that can be easier and more cost effective to deploy and manage.
While malicious attacks can penetrate stateful packet inspection firewalls, early attempts at deep packet inspection with UTM often resulted in significant performance reduction.
Clean VPN
With the evolution of ecommerce, traditional retail boundaries are disappearing and “the store” is no longer limited to any specific physical location. Retail boundaries are blurring, with “outside” partners, vendors and consultants playing an increasingly vital a role in daily operations, often collaborating in cross-functional teams requiring secure access to “inside” application resources from “outside” devices, traversing internal and external firewalls. Increased access has increased productivity. However, it has also increased the number of access points, devices and network environments that are outside of the enterprise’s direct control. It is more important than ever to monitor and secure both the traffic flowing through the network perimeter and the endpoints beyond the perimeter.
A “clean VPN” approach integrates a layer of intelligent remote access technology such as a Secure Sockets Layer virtual private network (SSL VPN) to secure users and devices beyond the perimeter, with layer of intelligent firewall technology such as Unified Threat Management (UTM) to secure data traffic penetrating the perimeter. To be practically effective, an integrated clean VPN should be able to comprehensively detect the integrity of all endpoints, users and data traffic; protect resources against unauthorized access and malware attacks; and connect authorized users easily to mission-critical resources in real time.
It is essential for retailers to deploy a solution that streamlines the complexity out of retail security, allowing retailers of all sizes to leverage the Internet and their networks to enhance productivity, while maintaining the confidentiality, integrity and availability of their information assets. Break free from premium-priced, complex legacy systems with easy, affordable solutions that are robust enough to support the needs of any organization.
Conclusion
Retailers stand to gain more competitive advantages in the marketplace from technology than ever before, with corresponding gains in cost reduction, revenue opportunities and customer satisfaction. To secure this competitive edge, however, retailers must take a comprehensive approach to protecting their technology from increasingly sophisticated threats.
By Ang Chye Hin, Director of Sales, ASEAN, SonicWALL
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