Tips for Retailers to Avoid Tech Security Outages

In partnership with Censuswide Research, NCR Voyix recently commissioned a survey of U.S. IT professionals and found that nearly 40 percent of respondents average 86 instances of regular maintenance to their in-store technology stacks each year. The kicker: 40 percent of respondents said these updates can take between two weeks and six months for an all-store rollout.

During this prolonged process, system outages can occur, impacting every part of your store’s operations. The key to minimizing these occurrences across any retailer’s stores is a well-planned and practiced preventative maintenance program.

Minimize Risk With the Right Support

The platforms you work with, including those from cloud service providers, along with human error and breakdowns in internal IT operations, present challenges that retailers must address.

By collaborating with your technology providers and prioritizing IT, you’re more likely to avoid some of the common technology outage issues.

Partnering with experts who understand your business intricacies and can anticipate potential challenges during peak times is incredibly valuable. We worked with several retailers last year as they prepared for peak season, and they would tell you that the secret to achieving no lanes down is collaborating early with a single point of contact to develop a strategy for repairing, restoring and simply maintaining your technology stack.

It’s reassuring to know you have backup when needed. Anecdotally, we had 3,000 customer engineers ready to assist if something didn’t go according to plan during the peak season.

Related story: How Can the Right Technology Solutions Aid in Staffing Woes?

Ensure Your Stores Can Operate Offline

While the benefits of the cloud — adopted by thousands of retailers — include flexibility and the speed to respond to potential incidents, ensuring that your stores can still operate offline is essential.

Consider a scenario in which a store’s credit card and debit card systems go down, and customers can only pay with cash. Today’s shoppers, who often don’t carry cash, cannot complete their purchases. In this case, you might have to temporarily shutter your doors since customers cannot pay in their preferred manner.

We suggest rehearsing system outages by periodically taking the primary server down and relying on a backup server. This preventative measure helps your team understand the necessary steps to take during system outages and adjust plans to improve future responses. Have a disaster recovery point person in place rather than waiting to appoint a systems outage lead when such an event occurs. This employee can oversee the incident from start to finish.

Go All in on Edge Technology

The survey mentioned earlier found that, despite growing interest in modernizing architecture, 93 percent of U.S. respondents admit their organizations lack a fully implemented retail edge plan.

Key to retail transformation, edge computing is an essential component that can help minimize system downtime. Its architecture allows retailers to operate at web speed and enables highly distributed changes, empowering them to run their stores like digital channels.

Practice Preventative Maintenance

In 2019, several major retailers suffered costly outages due to Black Friday traffic. At the time, the cloud wasn’t as robust and reliable as it is in 2025. While it’s now easier for large-scale cloud providers to offer greater capacity during retail surges, the demands on in-store technology are higher than ever. The U.S. Census Bureau reported a 4 percent increase in core retail sales this past peak season. PwC data indicates that 63 percent of consumers who shop in stores more frequently during the holiday season say self-checkout technology and mobile payment solutions are important when shopping.

That’s why it’s essential to prioritize preventative maintenance. It will equip your business to increase technology availability and stability while managing in-store technology with e-commerce agility.

Mike Groesch serves as senior vice president of retail services at NCR Voyix and is responsible for the global remote services team of over 3,000 associates.