Retail Resilience: Solving the Network Downtime Dilemma

A seamless and streamlined customer experience (CX) is everything in retail. Modern consumers want to find, peruse, and buy products easily and conveniently, in-store or online. However, maintaining an enjoyable CX for shoppers can become unfeasible during network outages. Prolonged incidences can jeopardize more than CX; they can impede retailers’ ability to process payments, track inventory, access surveillance footage, and other essential tasks. Retailers need a reliable network to minimize downtime and safeguard CX and other critical operations.

The Causes and Costs of Network Outages 

Network resilience is vital today, not only because of heightened expectations from shoppers but also because outages are becoming more commonplace. This is due to the adoption of advanced technologies, such as point-of-sale stations, security cameras, and self-service checkout kiosks powered by Internet of Things (IoT) devices. The possibility of disruption also escalates as software stacks and network devices become more complex and as more data processing occurs at branches and other edge locations.

While these new technologies and edge computing techniques improve logistics, uphold compliance, and reduce costs, anything from ISP (internet service provider) carrier issues to fiber cuts and human error could spell disaster. To make matters worse, network administrators often lack visibility into the full network, making it difficult to diagnose issues properly and further extending downtime. These outages can cost retailers as much as $1 million for every hour of network downtime in damages and lost revenue. In fact, 72 percent of retailers lose sales during an outage. Furthermore, outages negatively impact security, operations, productivity and CX.

Maintaining Operations With Out-of-Band Management 

One approach retailers can use to create a more resilient network is out-of-band (OOB) management, which is an independent management plane that allows technicians to securely and remotely lock down critical functions of the production network while configuring, managing and troubleshooting devices on the OOB network without disrupting normal operations.

Even if the data plane is down, OOB management permits technicians to solve problems through a secondary connection (typically by way of 4G LTE), thus minimizing network downtime and saving time and money. Likewise, best-in-class OOB solutions include enterprise-grade security features, enabling retailers to maintain security and encryption requirements and thwart cyberattacks that would otherwise cause additional network outages.

Enhancing OOB Capabilities With Failover to Cellular 

Another solution retailers should consider implementing is Failover to Cellular, a technology that can provide an additional layer of resilience through a secondary connection that activates if the primary connection fails. When combined with solutions like Failover to Cellular, OOB management helps retailers maximize uptime at their various store locations, ensuring customers don’t experience disruptions during their shopping regardless of whether the primary connectivity method goes down.

Failover to Cellular also helps retailers maintain visibility of the entire network, empowering administrators to swiftly identify and remediate issues. Additionally, Failover to Cellular and OOB management provides retailers with more bandwidth and availability to overcome the last-mile challenge or the speed bottleneck in networks that limit the amount of data transmitted to an ISP.

Bring Value to the Entire Network Lifecycle  

Although retailers should have strategies to alleviate instances of network downtime, these occurrences are just a small part of the broader range of network scenarios. Therefore, as retailers embrace increasingly sophisticated technology, it becomes imperative for them to allocate resources to solutions like OOB management that can streamline and even automate day-one provisioning as well as daily management and monitoring tasks, thereby enhancing the overall network lifecycle.

Alan Stewart-Brown is vice president of EMEA for Opengear, a company that ensures network resilience to enterprises by enabling business continuity with the Network Resilience Platform.