Click-and-mortar: Fortifying retail security in the omnichannel era

With an impressive presence of stores across Australia and New Zealand, this organisation stands as one of Australia’s largest specialty retailers.

The seamless performance of omnichannel operations is crucial to any organisation in the retail industry at large. Committed to providing continuous support to its customers, means ensuring they have access to over 20,000 products through an omnichannel retail experience.

As this retailer continued to invest in digital technologies to enhance this experience, their potential attack surface was increasing. Bringing on a specialised security partner was imperative for ensuring the security of critical data and operations.

Big opportunity, bigger uncertainty

Like many retailers, this customer has become increasingly reliant on its IT systems. Therefore, the more technology drives operations, the more vulnerable it can become to cyber risks. A malfunction of IT systems or a cyber security violation could significantly impact their ability to trade, meet customer needs, and protect personal information.

“We see cyber security as an area of increasing risk for our business. That’s in part due to the speed at which we have grown, especially in our e-commerce business, and more frequent attacks from increasingly sophisticated threats,” said the Head of IT.

Amplifying digital

This retailers’ internal IT team was traditionally primarily focused on managing and supporting its systems and infrastructure. In recent years the technology team has grown and focused on digital transformation initiatives to support business growth. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated changes in the customer experience and underscored the imperative for remote and flexible team member working.

The resultant rapid growth in size and complexity of the technology footprint, along with increasingly sophisticated cyber threats, highlighted to our customer a significant gap in their skillset – security-specific expertise. This reflects the current scarcity of cybersecurity professionals in the market today. Nonetheless, it was imperative for them to place cyber security at the forefront of their digital execution.

The Head of IT explained, “We needed to find a trusted partner to improve our cyber security capability and capacity to minimise risks for our customers and our business”.

Managing the skill shift

Interactive has a long-established relationship with our customer as their private cloud provider, supporting them with on-premise infrastructure and hosting their business-critical applications and data. Seeking assistance with managing their cyber security, this retailer turned to the IT partner they know and trust.

Interactive conducted both a risk assessment and gap analysis of our customer’s business, identifying a need for more sophisticated security tools and services to detect and prevent threats. As a result, the retailer saw the need for a long-term solution, highlighting the importance of engaging a partner for 24×7 security monitoring and incident response.

“We are very happy with uptime of our infrastructure and Interactive’s responsiveness, and we were impressed by the knowledge and responsiveness of the Interactive cyber security team and their understanding of our business and our risks,” said the Head of IT.

Building a secure foundation

Interactive also took the team through an initial security workshop, which mapped out risks to the retailers IT systems and wider business, outlining the services required to improve their security maturity and reduce overall risk.

Our customer engaged Interactive’s Managed Detection and Response, and Vulnerability Management as a Service (VMaaS) services, coupled with 24×7 monitoring and incident response, provided by Interactive’s Cyber Security Operations Centre (CSOC). In protection of the retailers’ operations, these services would provide advanced monitoring, detection, and response capabilities. They would also help protect, identify, and respond to threats, and remediate the business’s platforms and networks to prevent the threat from reoccurring.

The road to enablement

The Head of IT explains the significance of their partnership with Interactive on future operations, “Interactive helped us develop a security roadmap and risk assessment in the context of our specific business activities and outcomes. That has elevated the security conversation to the board level, which gave us the executive buy-in we needed to ensure our cyber security maturity is prioritised.”

Since onboarding Interactive’s managed security services, our customer’s internal IT team has been able to focus on strategic projects, including improvements to its omnichannel customer experience capabilities. Overall, Interactive’s influence on security awareness and maturity uplift across the retailer’s team has been significant.

“How we are managing cyber risk internally and responding to incidents is ‘night and day’ compared to how we did this before,” said the Head of IT.

Increasing their cyber security maturity is also giving this retailer the confidence to explore the adoption of more agile and cost-effective software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions and the introduction of further digital innovation into the business.