Driven by the global pandemic, the retail sector has transformed significantly because of shifts in customer transaction patterns and workforce practices. Stay-at-home orders and safety concerns prompted a surge in online shopping for a broader range of goods.
Introduction
Driven by the global pandemic, the retail sector has transformed significantly because of shifts in customer transaction patterns and workforce practices. Stay-at-home orders and safety concerns prompted a surge in online shopping for a broader range of goods.
In response, retail companies swiftly adapted to prioritize online engagement to avoid declining sales or even store closures. Forward-thinking brands strategically invested in enhancing online experiences, streamlining checkout processes, promoting online stores and mobile app usage, improving online customer service and reallocating budgets to online marketing.
These proactive measures were essential for capturing maximum revenue in the evolving online marketplace.
Challenges
Efforts to achieve a swift purchasing experience, however, expose retailers to potential cyber threats as extensive customer databases for loyalty programs, companies store sensitive data in corporate databases are attractive targets for cybercriminals.
Retailers with weak authentication controls provide entry points for attackers to exploit customer accounts; the shift to remote work also often results in unforeseen vulnerabilities, leading to social engineering attacks on the employees.
The distributed workforce model, coupled with the adoption of cloud tools, expands the attack surface, leading to demands for expertise in managing security policies. Many online retailers struggle to adapt, whilst relying on legacy setups, and are faced with data breaches that compromise payment, personal and credential data.
These challenges affect network stability, site availability, employee morale and customer satisfaction, impacting long-term revenue, brand loyalty and reputation.
In order to address the aforementioned challenges, retailers must consider adopting Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), where proactive security services enable both protection and seamless access to everything users have privileges to, anytime and from anywhere. SASE is the simplest way to secure and connect millions of access points in and out of company resources at scale.
Requirements
It is imperative that retail businesses adopt tools that balance facilitating online sales while safeguarding sensitive data against various cyber threats.
Effective cyberattack prevention measures must address the vulnerability of remote back-office access on personal devices through unsecured home networks. Additionally, they should tackle challenges arising from the distributed workforce's reliance on cloud tools, which contributes to a rise in data breaches associated with expanded cloud collaboration, including network connections and access to cloud apps/services.
For a retailer-centric Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), replacing legacy setups is also important in order to stay current and to keep up with the escalating network security demands. The absence of a proactive security approach using real-time intelligence leaves retailers ill-equipped to respond effectively to cyberattacks, resulting in network blindspots, policy misconfigurations and ultimately, data breaches, whilst relying on traditional methods of protecting corporate and customer data.
Lanner Solution
The NCA-1040SE is a fanless multi-service gateway powered by the Intel® Atom X6413E/Intel Pentium N6210 processor (Codenamed Elkhart Lake). It was introduced to fulfill the demand for edge computing security and CPE.
The NCA-1040SE’s form factor (180 x 32 x 168 mm), relatively low power consumption and robust processing capability all make it ideal for edge deployments, branch offices and retail settings for applications such as routing, VoIP, VPN, firewall, IPS/IDS, web filtering, email server, high-volume storage and wireless networking hub.
For memory, NCA-1040SE supports up to 32GB DDR4 3200 MHz SODIMM and this platform is equipped with 4x SMA antenna connectors for wireless signals. The NCA-1040SE’s other features include mini-PCIe, M.2 and nano SIM slots for WiFi/5G/LTE (SKU A), 4x 2.5GbE RJ45 ports, 1x console port, 1x USB 3.0 and 1x display port.
Benefits
Implementing Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) for retailers represents a comprehensive approach to network security and connectivity, not only addressing the specific needs of the retail industry but also delivering enhanced security measures, improved network performance through SD-WAN capabilities and the flexibility of a cloud-native architecture.
By adopting SASE, retailers can achieve a secure, scalable and agile network infrastructure that caters to the demands of modern digital retail operations.
NCA-1040SE-based SASE consolidates digital technologies, cloud platforms, branch offices, and remote/mobile users into an unified interface, providing access privileges across the network and in the cloud. The single-pane-of-glass interface ensures high-fidelity visibility into users, devices, applications and security services, serving as a tangible security asset.
A comprehensive SASE solution also offers full visibility into user and device access attempts, traffic throughput and architecture. Together with a single security event management console that features centralized reporting, logging and access controls, operations for security and governance teams can be further streamlined, not only reducing the need for multiple vendor audits to just one but also facilitating change management for new compliance requirements through a single-pane-of-glass policy configuration and reporting.
Finally, by integrating Secure SD-WAN into the SASE architecture, retailers are able to leverage broadband and 4G/5G/LTE to address increasing bandwidth demands, as SASE automatically directs traffic over the most efficient route, ensuring seamless and reliable operation of all applications; this, in turn, allows customers to consistently enjoy an excellent shopping experience, freeing up the entire workforce to focus on exceeding customer expectations.
Conclusion
For today's retail sector, prioritizing customer and data security involves a streamlined approach with simplified access policies, extensive network visibility and a focus on safeguarding customer data amidst the demands of a widely distributed workforce.
Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) embodies this strategy, providing proactive security services for protection and seamless access to authorized users across diverse locations, simplifying the secure connection of numerous access points to and from company resources at scale.
Lanner’s NCA-1040SE is SASE-ready and can be deployed for services such as SD-WAN, zero trust network access, secure web gateways and firewall-as-a-service. These services are efficiently delivered through an unified software stack adaptable to various deployment models, including cloud, on-premises or hybrid environments.
Related Articles
- Cloud-native SASE Deployment for Efficient and Secure Network Transformation
- Whitebox Network Appliances Enable Cloud-based uCPE for SASE
Featured Product
NCA-1040SE
Fanless x86 Network Appliance With Intel® Atom X6413E CPU or Intel Pentium N6210 Processor
| CPU | Intel® Atom X6413E Or Intel Pentium N6210 |
| Chipset | SoC |
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