How SD-WAN Secures and Benefits Retailers

Retailers face an ever-growing risk of sophisticated cyberattacks that target the digital experiences and products their consumers increasingly demand. Cyber criminals are launching targeted attacks against connected devices, from laptops and smartphones to Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices and wearables, and the complex technologies that secure them.

Retail cybersecurity attacks are increasingly common due to the vast amount of payment information and sensitive personal data that retailers have access to. This is further exacerbated by many retailers continuing to rely on siloed legacy infrastructure, networks, and systems that are not designed for modern cloud-based, data-intensive environments. This infrastructure prevents them from achieving the agility, resilience, and scalability required to deploy new technologies that meet customers’ evolving demands. 

As a result, retailers struggle to deploy innovative, next-generation customer experiences. They become vulnerable to attacks and unable to keep pace with their more forward-thinking competitors.

In a widely publicized 2013 breach, 70 million Target consumers found their data stolen. Just recently, Home Depot agreed to a $17.5 million settlement fee over a data breach suffered in 2014. Cyberattacks in the retail industry are not showing any signs of slowing down as significant cybersecurity events continue to affect retailers. For example:

1. Estée Lauder had 440 million records exposed through middleware security failures in February 2020.
2. Italian drinks firm Campari suffered a ransomware attack that took its systems offline in November 2020.
3. Men’s clothing company Bonobos saw the personal and financial information of up to 7 million customers leaked in January 2021.
4. The database of online musical instruments marketplace Reverb had the personal details of more than 5.6 million users, including names, email addresses, PayPal details, and Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, leaked to the dark web in April 2021.
5. Fashion retailer Guess suffered a data breach after a ransomware attack in February 2021, resulting in sensitive customer data being leaked, such as driver’s license numbers, passport numbers, social security numbers, and other financial data.

One of the most important innovations for retail cybersecurity is software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN). Preventing retail cyberattacks with SD-WAN ensures organizations achieve high-speed connectivity to their point-of-sale (POS) systems and other applications. 

The primary role of WAN is to connect users to their applications regardless of where the application resides, be it on-premises or in the cloud. SD-WAN for retail helps maximize application and network performance. One of the key benefits is that traffic does not have to be routed through a retailer’s corporate data center, ensuring faster internet connections. However, this can also introduce new vulnerabilities if data center-level security controls are no longer being applied.

To mitigate this, SD-WAN implementation must be bolstered with additional security solutions like advanced firewalls to protect retailer infrastructures against malware and evolving cyber threats.

Examples of how SD-WAN benefits retailers include:

SD-WAN provides retailers with centralized visibility of their environment, which is managed through one central controller. This ensures retailers can see all the devices and users connecting to their network. An SD-WAN also reduces the complexity of retailers’ networks and helps them provision new sites, increase bandwidth, alter traffic priority, and upgrade their firmware and software.

Many retailers now use applications that reside in the cloud, as well as edge and local environments. These applications all compete for bandwidth, which can further increase network complexity. SD-WAN enables retailers to monitor the performance of their data and ensure the appropriate level of bandwidth is allocated to each application and service. 

Retailers need to identify and manage threats as quickly as possible. SD-WAN enables them to automatically detect security risks as soon as they appear and issue alerts that allow security teams to respond immediately.

SD-WAN solutions use AI and machine learning techniques that provide proactive threat intelligence. This ensures organizations immediately discover rapidly evolving threats targeting their cloud applications, POS systems, and other network infrastructure.

As consumers increasingly demand high performance from retailers, it is vital to minimize latency and maximize network visibility. Advanced firewall solutions enable retail organizations to thoroughly inspect encrypted traffic without impacting the speed or throughput of their network.

Retailers that operate large networks across various locations are looking to the cloud to centralize their resources and systems. However, spreading this infrastructure across different private and public clouds can result in a siloed environment that would be difficult to manage and secure. Multi-cloud deployments are becoming increasingly popular as they centralize visibility and simplify management and policy enforcement.