Strengthen your retail business's ability to adapt with efficient IT service management
Traditional retail businesses are stepping up their technology infrastructure as e-commerce giants enter their markets. Retailers across the globe are investing heavily in digital capabilities to keep up with changing customer expectations and thrive in a cutthroat industry.
Retail organizations' IT departments are the driving force behind this digital transformation, ensuring the around-the-clock availability of vital business services. These services are supported by a diverse range of applications and hardware.
Retail businesses rely on enterprise services in addition to IT, such as facilities, payroll, HR, and finance. These enterprise departments facilitate retail operations like managing warehouses, restocking inventory, and organizing retail staff. However, most retailers use different channels and tools for managing their enterprise support, leading to higher costs and difficulties coordinating teams for retail services.
Retail businesses operate a complex network of servers, POS terminals, and other IT assets. If an availability incident occurs and the POS terminal or e-commerce website goes down, retail organizations lose money by the minute. Retail businesses also have a vast amount of consumer data stored in their servers, which is used to provide personalized recommendations and is vulnerable to security breaches that can result in billions of dollars in penalties. Without a proactive incident management strategy, retail businesses will be unable to continue operations, as POS terminals and internet-based retail transactions are now the mainstay for both online and in-store sales.
Retailers with a global network of stores utilize various IT assets that are essential for daily operations, including handheld devices like smartphones and tablets for scanning barcodes, POS terminals for processing payments, and routers and modems for networking operations. IT departments must ensure optimal performance of these IT assets while managing risks, costs, their budget, and forecasted IT purchases. Without a clear ITAM strategy, retailers struggle to track assets throughout their entire life cycle, from purchase to disposal, leading to underutilized assets, higher maintenance costs, and legal and security risks.
Major retail businesses with numerous physical stores and e-commerce portals across various continents may face multiple shadow IT projects due to a lack of collaboration and communication. An effective ITSM solution helps these retailers roll out changes and undertake IT projects without losing sight of dependencies, ensuring a more uniform IT infrastructure that is easier to oversee.
