#SDWAN Insights: Dimensions of Retail Differentiation

To solve the “sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t” store experience, you need to know about the network’s congestion and proactively compensate for it.

When it comes to the digital transformation of retail and restaurant, IT professionals have no choice.  The enormous design requirements of digitally-driven customer experience and employee engagement initiatives mandate a transition from T1/MPLS to broadband. How else can you achieve an order of magnitude increase in network capacity at a fraction of the cost? However, the dynamic nature of broadband requires the advantages of SDWAN to achieve consistent enterprise-grade performance. 

SD-WAN solutions vary widely in “what they know” and “what they can do with what they know.” To facilitate the selection process, retailers are encouraged to consider the following dimensions of differentiation: data analytics, application performance, network security, and total cost of ownership.

Data Analytics

In a world, where “Data is the new oil” the more you know, the greater your opportunity. SD-WAN solutions vary widely not only in what data they collect and how frequently they collect it but also in how they visualize and use the data. 

The retailer’s need defines the requirements. To achieve consistent enterprise-grade application performance over the fluctuating broadband connections, retailers should require their SD-WAN solution to track latency, packet loss, and congestion.

Latency – describes how packets flow through a network. Excessive latency may result in transaction timeouts and incur the frustration of having to repeat the POS transaction.

Packet loss – measures the amount of data that fails to reach the destination and must be retransmitted.

Congestion – like the traffic many of us will experience during our daily commute, congestion describes how large amounts of other data in the network interferes with your store’s ability to use the internet. A store’s application performance may vary widely depending on what other users are doing throughout the network.

Solving network congestion requires a real-time understanding of how much data is being sent and how much network capacity is available. While most SD-WAN solutions have the ability to track the data being sent through a network, SD-WAN providers vary widely in their ability to probe a broadband network and accurately predict the available capacity.

Visualizing Dimensions of Network Congestion over time

“Sometimes it works, Sometimes it doesn’t”

Like oil, data in and of itself is of limited value.  Retailers have been collecting POS data for many decades and have been getting very little value from it. It is what you do with data that enables the competitive advantage. For SD-WAN providers, the key question is once you know the latency, packet loss, and congestion of a broadband network, "what do you do about it?" Specifically, how do you achieve consistent enterprise-grade application performance over conditions of dynamic, even chaotic, fluctuations in network capacity? 

One of the most common frustrations in retail are POS transactions that “sometimes work and sometimes do not.” Usually, POS transactions will complete in less than a few seconds. However, sometimes, they can take 20 seconds, 30 seconds, or longer, resulting in long customer checkout lines.  When the store's data needs exceed the capacity of the Internet connection, data packets may be randomly dropped. The long POS transaction times are usually caused by data that fails to reach the destination and needs to be retransmitted. For a single POS transaction, data loss doesn’t just occur once, it may occur a multitude of times, resulting in very long transaction times that in some cases will timeout and have to be restarted. 

The network is still “up.” The network is still passing data, just not all of the data. This problem has become more acute due to retail’s transition to EMV credit card transactions. EMV transactions involve more data and more data exchanges across the network than traditional credit card transactions. With the transitions to EMV transactions, both the customer and the employees have become more sensitized to network conditions impacting customer checkout experience in the store.

Nobody gets to tell the Internet, “give me 50 Mbps” of capacity. Sometimes the internet will give you 50 Mbps of capacity. Sometimes it will give you less than 5 Mbps. 

 The key to consistent POS transactions is to not drop packets! Some SDWAN solution anticipate how much internet capacity is available at any moment in time and then proactively shape the store traffic to fit into the available capacity. Alternatively, other SD-WAN solutions address the problem of packet loss in a congested network by replicating data packets either over the same circuit connection or over multiple independent circuits. The idea is that if we know data packets are being dropped over a congested connection, we can compensate for the loss by replicating the packets. If a packet is lost, there's a reasonable chance it's clone will make it across the network.

An effective way to test an SDWAN solution's congestion management capabilities is to attempt VoIP calls while stress testing the internet connection (e.g. web crawlers, traffic generators, etc.) VoIP's call quality is extremely sensitive to network congestion.

Network Security

In retail IT, if it can’t be secured, it can’t be used. SD-WAN solutions vary widely in their approach to network security. For some SDWAN solutions, network security is an integration of a third-party provider (e.g. Zscaler). For other SDWAN solutions, network security is natively integrated with the SDWAN technologies into the CPE hardware. Regardless of the approach, retailers are encouraged to thoroughly vet the network security solutions being proposed. Some SDWAN providers are proposing home-grown solutions, which have been self-validated, while others are using market-validated network security offerings.

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls may provide a helpful starting point. It may be found at: https://www.gartner.com/en/documents/3961528/magic-quadrant-for-network-firewalls

In addition to comparing each provider’s current network security standing, retailers are also encouraged to compare against last year's security standing. Is the provider improving in their market position as a network security solution?

Total Cost of Ownership

Finally, when it comes to SDWAN, retailers should also consider the total cost of ownership. In addition to considering the hardware costs and software licenses, consider the ongoing maintenance fees, installation, operations, customer care, and field maintenance.  

When it comes to IT, retailers have always been challenged to do more with less. In today’s chaotic market of digital disruptions, retail IT professionals are encouraged to invest and focus their valuable internal resources into the immense technical effort to digitally transform their stores.  The mundane and time-consuming activities of managing a complex, nationwide network infrastructure may often best be addressed by managed service providers. The challenge in Retail IT is finding both the internal and external resources to adequately prepare their stores to compete in the marketplace of the future.

Conclusion

SDWAN solutions provide an enormous opportunity for Retail IT practitioners to bridge the gap between where they are and where they need to be. However, given the wide breadth of available solutions, retailers are encouraged to carefully assess SDWAN solutions in terms of data analytics, application performance, and network security. 

Furthermore, for some retailers, a managed SDWAN solution may provide the opportunity to unload mundane operational activities and focus internal technical resources on the true challenge of the digital disruption of retail.

Additional thought-leadership articles and videos regarding the digital transformation of retail may be found at: https://hughesbusiness.hughes.com/TimTang.html

More information about Hughes Managed Secure SDWAN may be found at: https://business.hughes.com/