Retail cybersecurity challenges include a wide variety of points of vulnerability. Point-of-sale (PoS) systems, POS terminals, and other IoT devices are all potential targets for cyber attacks.
Secure SASE brings together networking and security capabilities in a single solution. This unified architecture simplifies network and security operations, reduces the number of vendors, and helps ensure security policies are applied consistently.
Greater Flexibility
Retailers face a wide range of cybersecurity challenges that can threaten their profits. Cyberattacks can quickly disrupt retail operations, from payment systems that process credit cards to POS devices, inventory, and point-of-sale systems to customer data stored online.
As a result, cybersecurity teams must protect all of their critical applications in the cloud and across a highly distributed network. This requires security services to be unified and delivered to be easily adapted for new business requirements without creating additional risk or draining IT resources too quickly.
SASE solves these challenges by merging SD-WAN with managed security services in a single platform. By delivering services and enforcing policies based on identity (a person, device, service, or IoT device), enabling Zero Trust anywhere, with performance/latency optimization via routing to the nearest Point of Presence (PoP), SASE can help retail organizations secure their networks, users, apps and data wherever they go. It also enables IT to reduce costs and complexity by consolidating the number of vendors that are needed. Thus, it gives cyber security for retail and provides flexibility with enhanced security
Reduced Complexity
The right SASE solution can help break down network siloes and simplify the architecture that connects branch offices, remote workers, and SaaS cloud providers. However, picking the best solution requires setting goals, establishing requirements, and understanding essential capabilities. Organizations may encounter challenges, particularly if they select solutions from vendors with solid backgrounds in networking or security but not in another area.
A SASE solution with integrated networking and numerous security capabilities simplifies management while enabling cost savings. For example, a unified security service can include firewall-as-a-service, secure web gateway, CASB, and DLP to provide a comprehensive framework that addresses compliance regulations and protects sensitive information.
An additional advantage is the superior user experience offered by an SASE solution. Direct Internet access eliminates the latency of backhauled connections, and SD-WAN technology optimizes traffic flows to ensure consistent performance. For security, identity-aware zero-trust access enables safe use of sanctioned applications while preventing the lateral movement of malware inside the corporate network.
Simplified Management
Retailers must address many security threats impacting customer data and disrupting operations. The risk of a data breach can damage a brand’s reputation and lead to financial loss. As a result, retailers need robust network infrastructure with strong cybersecurity connections.
Traditional networks have many security components, including a VPN that connects headquarters to remote locations, MPLS or private clouds that connect branches and stores, and an intranet that connects employees. Secure SASE allows retailers to simplify their network architecture with a single service that delivers networking and security together, with inline visibility, granular control, and preventative measures. The rapid expansion of the retail industry due to new store openings, acquisitions, and expansions makes it challenging for security teams to keep up with the demands on their networks. With secure SASE, retailers can easily deploy and manage security across all remote stores quickly, automatically, and orchestrated. This includes deploying and managing Web Application Firewalls (WAF), proxies, DDoS protection, and identity/access management.
Increased Security
Secure SASE is a powerful, scalable way to connect and protect retail locations. Unlike traditional infrastructure-first SASE, it offers unified data protection policies, unified agents, risk adaptive policy enforcement, and hybrid deployment for sites without adding extra hardware or complexity.
Retail cybersecurity leaders want easy solutions to procure, deploy, and maintain – and can keep up with network changes and threats. They must also improve network performance, security, and compliance management while reducing operating costs.
With integrated networking and security with centralized management, retailers can lower ongoing maintenance costs and reduce the risk of human errors that can create undesirable holes. In addition, a centralized architecture can run holistic behavior analytics to quickly detect and respond to unknown malware or vulnerabilities and deliver updates faster and more efficiently than siloed systems. Lastly, a unified security architecture can help support retail’s unique business requirements like work-from-home initiatives, BYOD policies, and high turnover rates. It can also meet stringent data privacy and regulatory requirements for segregation, visibility, and control of applications and services.
Reduced Costs
Using a single solution to manage networking and security eliminates the need for specialized hardware, reducing capital expenses. In addition, the consolidation of management tools, like branch FWaaS, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), zero trust access network (ZTNA), cloud application control (CASB), and advanced threat prevention into one service, reduces operational costs associated with hardware maintenance, patching, and upgrades.
Integrated security and networking capabilities deliver significant performance improvements and cost savings at the edge. For instance, SASE’s single-pass engine allows encrypted traffic to be opened and inspected only once rather than multiple times by security stacks at distributed PoPs, which results in much lower latency and much more efficient use of resources.
Whether the retail industry needs to enable employees to work remotely or protect the data exchanged by smart healthcare devices, SASE is the answer. This model makes work from anywhere possible by addressing today’s networks’ security and performance challenges.
