In the third part of this series dedicated to secure remote access in retail, we look at how retailers are scaling their IT operations, enhancing security, and solving challenges unique to this field.
As a retail business grows, so do the challenges that are associated with it. Managing various technology across hundreds of stores means supporting thousands of devices. All this while ensuring the security of sensitive data (a lot of it being customer data).
This requires a scalable and secure remote access solution. Failing that, teams can quickly become overwhelmed, which in turn leads them being ineffective. This inevitably means increased costs, at best, and security issues, at worst. Let’s see how RealVNC Connect can help.
Managing Large-Scale Retail Networks
Retailers with hundreds of locations rely significantly more on centralized IT management than other companies might. For example, a major Danish grocery chain, operating 400 stores, uses 3500 licenses of RealVNC Connect for internal support. Their most important requirement is that each store only gets access to its own computers. HQ, in turn, needs access to all PCs. With group policy and SSO in conjunction with RealVNC Connect, this granular control is possible. This means secure and efficient management across the network.
The same goes for a large German discount supermarket chain. They support over 700 users with the store IT tea. They rely on RealVNC Connect for POS access. They use the cloud brokered solution for this and it makes their lives much easier.
We discussed some other POS-related issues that RealVNC Connect solves in t
Better Security and Efficiency
You can’t treat security as an afterthought. Not in general, and especially not when you’re dealing with a complex IT environment. One of our customers, a global packaging company that servers mostly the retails industry, faced the challenge of having to provide support both to users working from home and in their offices. After facing data breaches when using their previous provider, they turned to RealVNC Connect. They can now access 700 servers, which are only accessible via our software. By managing device permissions granularly and using our solution with SSO and APIs for automation, they now have built a highly secure and efficient remote support framework. This focus on security allows the IT team to manage a vast infrastructure in a confident fashion. The ability to integrate APIs and SSO helped simplify device management.
Unique Challenges
Every retailer faces its own distinct challenges. A major American sporting goods retailer came to us with a need to support 430 stores and nearly 500 corporate users. They now use RealVNC Connect to support POS devices and laptops – all Windows devices. And they use group policies to manage device permissions seamlessly.
Another leading tool and equipment retailer uses an on-premises deployment of RealVNC Connect to provide unattended support for their registers. And this, across all their stores, on a nationwide scale.
We also have a customer in Denmark that owns a rapidly growing variety store chain. They had to replace their previous tool due to rising costs. They have over 700 users and they needed better value, as well as Active Directory integration. They found all this, as well as the scalability they required, in RealVNC Connect. Now, similarly to another retail customer mentioned above, they can restrict store access while having full HQ visibility and control.
Whether it’s multi-national store networks or solving specific pain points, RealVNC provides a secure, scalable, and versatile solution.
To be continued…
Stay tuned for our final instalment in this series. We will summarize the key takeaways from the series, giving an overview of how RealVNC Connect can become an important part of your retail technology strategy.
