Retail Organizations are increasingly tapping into the emerging digital technologies such as mobile, social, cloud, and IoT to provide better and more seamless experience to their customers, providers, suppliers, and employees. However, these new technologies come with a newer set of risks, increasing the threat surface. As the digital footprint of organizations increases, so does the touch points or fail points. Preventing theft, damage, and supply chain errors such as inventory spills has long been an unyielding and poorly understood problem for retailers. Longer supply chains, growing product assortments, and labor cuts have contributed to making loss prevention ever more challenging.

Additionally, this advent of new trends in Cloud Technologies, Mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) with the ever evolving threat landscape have completely redefined what enterprises require from their cybersecurity, risk and compliance frameworks. Today, an attack can come from various sources leading to significant financial and reputation repercussions.

However, despite the scale of the problem, just over a third (36.5%) of the retailers as surveyed said they were allocating new resources to loss prevention technology and were unclear how to draw cybersecurity implementations in their business ecosystem. Finding an effective solution is not simple, as retailers face a number of significant challenges, sample as below:

• High foot traffic – makes it difficult for staff to manually watch everything all the time. Organized groups have also developed ways to distract staff while theft takes place.
• Technological Mismatch - A lack of technology for advanced customer tracking, occupancy and in-store movement analytics, as well as forecasting for current inventory, results in overstocking losses
• Retailer Networks & Web Applications - Applications on required systems and consumer facing applications needs to be free from vulnerabilities and strongly secured
• Data & Privacy - Minimize the risk of cyber-attacks by discovering, monitoring, protecting and managing confidential data where it is stored

HCLTech understands how important each and every data-point is important in the store right from - Retail Entrance counter to Customers Footfall movements to POS Terminal to overall web & digital encounters - and has created a platform of unique products that will enable retailers to stay competitive and make experience for the consumer an enjoyable one.

We at HCLTech are excited to participate in NRF Protect – Retail’s Loss Prevention and Cyber Risk Event. We will be showcasing how Retail Organizations can create a security led shopping experiences for their customers by leveraging industry-leading HCLTech products.