Today, much of our lives—both professional and personal—are heavily managed and shaped by modern technology. From commerce and travel to our homes and relationships, we have access to a wide variety of tools that make our lives easier, faster, and more organized—until it doesn't. Disruptions to technology can range from minor inconveniences to major catastrophes, complicating the tasks that technology was supposed to simplify. Considering several recent major outages, such as the CrowdStrike-Windows outage, people everywhere are taking a closer look at the tools they rely on. Retail businesses, in particular, have a strong incentive to eliminate single points of failure that can trigger a domino effect, disrupting other critical store systems. Such failures can lead to disastrous consequences ranging from a significant loss of revenue and customer loyalty to store closures.

Rightfully, many retailers are taking this opportunity to examine their key systems for vulnerabilities, hoping that being proactive will help them avoid becoming the next major outage. However, because many of them rely on an extensive web of technology, spanning multiple tools and systems managed by different teams of employees, the underlying technology infrastructure can be surprisingly fragile. Preventing large-scale failure is not always a simple task.

Modern problems, however, call for modern solutions, and technology is already evolving to meet this need. In fact, the technology that is enabling systems to be more agile, easier to manage and faster to deploy comes with the additional benefit of being more resistant to failure and faster to resolve issues when they do occur.  

In particular, retailers who move from a traditional monolithic application technology in stores to an agile “cloud native” architecture that provides more security and flexibility will set themselves apart from the competition by delivering consistent, reliable services.

The key to effective agility and risk management in retail stores is deploying a retail aware edge-enabled platform.

‍The power of an edge-enabled platform

Whereas cloud-based strategies consolidate systems centrally, edge technology is distributed—a difference that is crucial to edge’s advantage when it comes to both real-time performance and resilience. In retail stores, trading must continue even if connectivity to the cloud, or key cloud systems, is unavailable for a period.

What’s more, the increasing volumes of data that need to be processed in stores—such as system health, customer behavior and video analytics—means a data strategy that accounts for what is going on at the edge is crucial.  "In a retail environment, without an edge strategy, any cloud strategy is at best incomplete, and at worst, destined for failure,” writes Nick East, GM, Software Products for Retail, NCR Voyix.

An edge-enabled platform in retail needs to take account of the need for resilience to failures in multiple systems in or above the store, in addition to coping well with handling and recovering from those issues and including secure remote access for IT teams to minimize site visits or the need for non-IT staff to handle IT fixes. This approach improves the likelihood that even if one part of the system fails, the rest can continue to function seamlessly, minimizing downtime and maintaining business continuity. Additionally, for some types of requirements, notably AI use cases like video analytics, edge computing brings processing power closer to the source of the data, enabling faster and more efficient processing right where the data and the insight from that data is needed.

The devil is in the detail, though. For bug fixes, updates, enhancements and other changes to essential operating systems to be rolled out more frequently and with less risk, a new type of technology stack changes the game.

Secure the operating system  

NCR Voyix’s next-gen commerce platform goes a step further than simply providing edge processing capabilities, and it starts with the operating system. This is delivered as an immutable and lightweight Linux OS — which is read-only and never patched. Instead, as is common in cloud and mobile environments, the OS is replaced using a 'blue/green’ pattern. It drives speed, efficiency and consistency, and hugely increases the reliability of the operating environment for a retail device such as a POS or self-checkout. Simultaneously, it significantly reduces the attack surface of one of the most vulnerable components in any retail environment. Above the operating system everything can run in a Kubernetes environment, sandboxed into containers and with a zero-trust, network encrypted application solution.  With this combination of edge architecture, security tools built into the upstream pipeline processes, and the immutable, read-only Linux OS, it removes the requirement to run endpoint security tools like CrowdStrike directly in the operating system on operational end points like the POS and self-checkout devices.  [BG4] 

Because the operating system is delivered to devices read-only, reverting to a previous version in case of an error is a simple and straightforward process. As is the case for containers and microservices that run on top of it.  This approach maximizes store uptime by maintaining high resilience against network, power, software and hardware failure and malware attacks. By contrast, environments where applications and end point protection are continually added or patched into the operating system create a risk that everything breaks with no easy means of recovery.  

Thwart bad actors with heightened security

Beyond operational gaffes, well-architected edge technology is also more resistant to malicious actions and other intentional breaches as it reduces the attack surface, limiting potential entry points for hackers.  All systems can only communicate on encrypted connections, and only with the systems they are authorized to communicate with. Data between these authorized systems travels on mTLS encrypted links. Furthermore, any compromised system is held in a container sandbox, minimizing any damage before it can be rolled back.  Edge technology, such as the NCR Voyix Commerce Platform, adopts a distributed approach that enhances security and resilience, while ensuring rapid isolation and mitigation of threats. Strong authentication of APIs addend users and role-based access control are table stakes.

Invest in future needs with a flexible system

Edge technology is built on the understanding that the retail landscape will continue to evolve and that retailers want to invest in technology that will grow with their business. Traditional, monolithic systems often require costly and extensive processes to incorporate new tools. Transitioning to a containerized microservices architecture with endpoint systems running on all any computing devices in stores, including POS, SCO and kiosk lanes, along with a comprehensive security stack, addresses the agility and security challenges retailers face today.  

Optimize your store IT performance with a winning edge strategy

NCR Voyix leads at the retail edge and can help you devise a strategy that optimizes your store IT performance and delivers the experiences your customers expect. Ready to build a winning retail edge strategy? Contact us and one of our experts will reach out to you soon.

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