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Don’t Wait Until Black Friday to Protect Your Endpoints

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We are approaching one of the most important and riskiest times of the year for retailers. Cyberattacks increase across the board around the holiday season, and attackers often target retail organizations given how critical this time is for their businesses. On average, nearly 20% of annual retail sales happen in November and December, and the impact of a breach can be disruptive to the business and brand.

Endpoints, like laptops, tablets, mobile and BYOD devices, public cloud infrastructure and SaaS applications play a bigger role in retailers’ business and how they engage with their customers. But more connectivity comes with more risks – especially around the holidays, when bad actors have been known to take advantage of unsuspecting organizations to exploit vulnerabilities and increase ransom payouts. And with endpoints being more distributed than ever, it makes for an even larger attack surface that retailers must secure to protect their bottom line.

Technology is an Asset for Retailers – But it Introduces More Risk

Internet connected devices are at the center of the new customer-retailer experience. Customers want personal, seamless, no-contact experiences, and each additional endpoint helps provide what today’s customers expect.

Self-service kiosks allow shoppers to take charge. Tablets and mobile devices put customer data at employees’ fingertips, allowing them to provide a personal shopping experience while reducing wait times. Laptops allow hybrid retail workers to provide personalized customer service from remote locations, and new use cases for AI in retail continue to emerge as organizations experiment with the technology to better serve customers and propel business.

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While endpoints pose a bevy of opportunities for best-in-class service and delivery, if left unmanaged, they can make this expansive IT architecture vulnerable to cyberattacks – taking down entire organizations (and sales) in the process. 

Research shows that more than 90% of cyberattacks and 70% of data breaches begin at the endpoint. The majority of employees are using at least four endpoint devices per day, offering attackers more opportunities and threat vectors to exploit. 

Managing Endpoint Devices Doesn’t Have to be this Hard

As a retailer, your investments in a modern customer experience shouldn’t result in added risk to your IT environment. In fact, you deserve an effective way to manage and secure heterogeneous endpoints across locations and systems – one that protects business from interruptions due to an operational outage or attack and keeps customers’ data safe. 

Manually managing every endpoint device in your network — leveraging 10+ management solutions, as many retailers often do — is hard work, and extremely taxing on IT resources. Consolidating your endpoint management tools simplifies IT personnel’s job, allowing them more time to focus on streamlining the customer experience and spend less time putting out IT fires. 

Also, automation plays an important role in IT operations. IT teams today can (and should!) leverage automation to streamline workflows such as: patch management, software deployment, endpoint security, remote access control and more. For truck bed storage manufacturer and retailer Decked, using automated endpoint management helped their IT team save upwards of 20 to 30 hours per week. And organizations around the world are seeing greater IT and business wins as a result of tightening up their endpoint management strategies.

Getting Ahead of Holiday IT Woes

Retail, for obvious reasons, is an industry that’s extremely risk-averse around the holiday season, given that 20% of their revenue comes in the last two months of the year. That means security controls or changes have to be implemented and tested ahead of the “change freeze” during the holiday rush – when there’s more customer traffic, higher customer expectations and any interruption in the customer experience could result in harm to your brand and bottom line.

Before your customers begin their holiday shopping, each endpoint device must be properly configured, managed, secured and primed to be an asset for growth. Your endpoints should enable your business and your customers, not hold you back. 

As your IT team gears up for this holiday season, with all the demand, threats and holiday cheer that are sure to come with it, consider what you can do now to ready your tools and defenses accordingly. Like most things in security, software and holiday planning, early preparation and execution is key. 


Matt Hastings is the VP of Product Management at NinjaOne. Hastings has been working with organizations to build and implement security programs and products for over a decade. He started his career in incident response, serving as engagement manager and technical lead for investigations involving nation-state, IP theft, espionage and financial crime. Later, he worked on designing and building security products and led the risk and security product portfolio for Tanium. Prior to NinjaOne, Hastings led the product management organization at Red Canary.

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