Technology has been around for many decades, but when the pandemic hit, it revolutionized the business world, especially the retail sectors. With the rise in digitization comes the chance for customers to obtain any information they need in their pockets to make sensible purchase decisions. This created the need for brick and mortar stores to integrate technologies into their business strategy, which aided the transition from the legacy retail model to the tech-driven retail model.
Integration doesn't stop with introducing wireless networks and IoT devices to the network infrastructure. Rather, these networks need to be monitored constantly to ensure a smooth shopping experience for customers, since retail business still functions with the customer-first motive.
Network monitoring can tell you why a router went down or when you need to upgrade or purchase new storage systems. This level of proactive monitoring requires a network monitoring solution, not just to meet, but to exceed customer expectations as well as elevate internal operations and make the organization future-ready.
From ensuring data security to enhancing the customer shopping experience, retail sectors need network monitoring solutions to cope with changing customer expectations and sudden business trends. Though manual labor can still be done, a computing system like a network monitoring solution is what you need to stay on top of your network. Here are the prime factors that retailers should consider when evaluating a network monitoring tool.
Retail sectors are data-driven, and keeping such data accessible is business-crucial. Retail data centers hold data of product inventory, staff records, customer details, transaction details, etc., which needs constant monitoring to keep server health and performance in check.
In the retail sectors, where numerous people, including staff and network admins are accessing data on a daily basis, if any one of them moves or deletes a file or folder by chance, it will largely affect the end-user experience. This is why tracking critical files and folders is essential to prevent accidental data loss.
Many retailers today offer free Wi-Fi to in-store customers, not only for the improved shopping experience, but also to gather data and create personalized marketing events. But this also poses risks of cyberattacks and malicious threats, which require network monitoring to keep such hazards away from your network.
To instantly get notified of faults without switching between multiple tools, integration is the key. A network monitoring tool should be able to integrate with third-party tools to send alerts and initiate faster troubleshooting.
As retail industries span across different regions, countries or continents, you need a network monitoring tool to gain complete visibility into the central data center and its corresponding networks. This helps to see the bigger picture of entire network architecture and foresee potential performance anomalies.
Be it asset tracking, reducing wait time, enabling faster checkouts, preventing loss or theft, or tracking shipment and delivery status, Radio Frequency ID (RFID) tags and GPS are key for the retail industry. One bad shopping experience due to a faulty sensor could have a potential effect on customer retention, which makes RFID and GPS monitoring highly essential.
Apart from IT components, retail sectors also started imposing IoT devices into their network infrastructure including cameras, scanners, people-counting sensors, point-of-sale (POS) equipment, Bluetooth beacons, digital signage, and more. Monitoring these IoT devices is important to provide personalized retail marketing and optimum store experience.
With retailers adopting brick-and-click models—buy-online-and-pickup-in-store (BOPIS), and e-commerce businesses adopting brick-and-mortar models—Amazon Go, helping them provide an uninterrupted omni-channel shopping experience network-wise must be the prime motive of network admins. Simply put, network admins should prioritize building a safer network that is agile, sustainable, and integral.
Integrating new technologies and implementing modern computing processes to be in line with business objectives and stay ahead of the competitors should be the next priority in building resilient networks.
With ever-increasing retail order volumes, ensuring continued network connectivity across headquarters, warehouses, and stores is challenging yet crucial for inventory management software (IMS) and warehouse management software (WMS) to perform at optimum level.
It's quite common in the retail sector to have both static and dynamic pricing models to keep up with the seasonal demands and consumer behavior trends. But every time the retailer changes the price of a product or category, the network admin needs to update it to the monitoring tool, which is quite labor-intensive.
Effective network management demands certain repetitive actions like clearing logs, checking free disk space, etc., to prevent futile network downtime. In some cases where there is an outage, the on-field team rushes to the floor only to find that the fault could have been fixed remotely. In both cases, there are chances that the network admins could miss a critical task that causes prolonged network downtime and costs the business its reputation.
In the retail industry, customer data is a monetary asset. Retailers should abide by PCI DSS compliance and other security policies to protect confidential customer data, such as personal information and payment information. If not, cyberattacks, data breaches, and non-compliant activities impose major threats to network security and customer data privacy. This further leads to brand distrust and customer churn.
Network admins need to manually analyze historical data and understand the data growth trends to predict potential disk utilization, which is an arduous task. But this is essential to make judicial storage purchases and save on the IT budget.
To alleviate above mentioned challenges, you need a network monitoring solution that is feature-rich and future-ready. This is where ManageEngine OpManager comes in!
OpManager is a dynamic network monitoring tool that helps you gain optimum network performance with multi-level threshold monitoring, thereby advocating for a healthy end-user experience. The intuitive dashboards and ready-to-use templates help gain a view of the network health, even on the go. Since proactive monitoring promotes hassle-free business operations, OpManager is what you need.
OpManager's comprehensive features make it stand out amongst other network monitoring solutions in the IT market. Some of them include:
With the emerging rise in IoT devices and omni-channel shopping experiences, retailers must invest in a comprehensive network monitoring solution such as ManageEngine OpManager. OpManager is a multi-functional, customizable, integrated, easy to use, and future-proof network monitoring solution that has got you covered for every retail hurdle that passed by, or that might arise.
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