Retail is one of a handful of verticals whose revenue, brand, culture and customer experience is directly driven by their distributed sites/stores. Enterprise retail organizations with 1000’s of sites have an enormous challenge of maintaining each stores performance on these key impact points by ensuring that their staff are well trained, stores are well managed and that customers keep walking through the doors.
But what about downtime?
If the infrastructure fails, the store is no longer able to take orders, the brand is impacted and you potentially loose customers and future business to competitors. This is why retail is making substantial investments into their store infrastructures to reduce the risk of downtime. But how are they doing this? In a recent report from the INI Group (Industry Insights: Analysis of IT At The Retail Store) it is discussed that some organizations are centralizing their data and applications which opens the risk of mass downtime if the datacenter goes down. Others are introducing heavy set systems on-site which is a high CAPEX / OPEX investment but still leaves susceptibility to extended periods of downtime.
However, most organizations are looking to Virtual Storage Appliances (VSA) to decentralize their store applications/data and centralize their IT and support. VSA’s are helping enterprise organizations in many verticals to create streamlined yet robust distributed infrastructures which are managed centrally and require substantially less CAPEX and OPEX investment.
“If it took one week to get an IT system up and running, it could take 5,000 business days to complete the same project at all [1,000] sites. Performing a single deployment every day, it would still require 2.7 years to complete the project.”
In this report, the INI group discusses how enterprise retail organizations are approaching VSA solutions and what their key requirements are to ensure their store stay online.
