Retail / Operational Resilience
99.99% uptime across 140 locations.
A multi-channel retailer with 140 physical stores, 3 distribution centers, and a high-traffic e-commerce platform. The Director of Operations had one rule: stores open on time, every day. Everything else is negotiable.
The problem
The previous provider only covered business hours. At 140 locations, things went wrong overnight constantly. WAN flaps, storage pressure, failed backup jobs. Nobody saw them until morning. Three times in the year before we came in, a store opened late because of an overnight failure nobody noticed. Each incident was a revenue hit and a reputation hit, and the operations leader had run out of patience.
The engagement
- SD-WAN deployment: Resilient, application-aware networking across every store and DC. Primary + backup paths. Auto-failover under 60 seconds.
- 24/7 NOC monitoring: Live visibility into network, storage, POS, and back-office systems at every location. Proactive alerts on capacity trends, not just outage events.
- Immutable backup & DR: Ransomware-resistant backups for ERP, WMS, and e-commerce. Under 1 hour RTO for revenue-critical systems. Quarterly DR drills.
- PCI-DSS scope reduction: Network segmentation and P2PE integration using validated PCI SSC solutions. Cardholder data environment shrunk by 55%, which meant a smaller audit scope and a smaller attack surface.
- DDoS protection for peak season: Multi-layer DDoS mitigation across e-commerce. Near-zero latency impact during Black Friday traffic.
The outcome
“99.99% uptime across 140 locations. Their NOC caught a storage failure at 2 AM and had it resolved before our first shift started.”
— Director of Operations, national retailer
- 99.99% measured uptime across all 140 store locations in the first 12 months
- Zero missed trading hours due to infrastructure or security events
- PCI scope reduced 55% via segmentation and P2PE. Audit effort dropped accordingly.
- E-commerce handled Black Friday at 14x baseline traffic with zero degradation
Voices from the engagement
Additional perspectives from the same engagement across different roles.
“The NOC model gave us one pane of glass for 140 stores plus 3 DCs plus the e-commerce platform. Before, I had six dashboards open and still missed things. Now I get one prioritized queue that actually reflects what matters.”
— CIO, national retailer
“A walk-in freezer controller alerted at 2:14 AM at my Tulsa store. Their NOC had the refrigeration vendor dispatched before my store manager even woke up. That would have been a closed day a year ago.”
— Regional Manager, national retailer