Challenge
A global specialty retailer needed to optimize eCommerce performance to maximize uptime and ensure security, particularly during its critical holiday shopping season. This leading global specialty clothing and accessories retailer operates more than 1,000 stores in North America, Mexico, China and the UK and ships to 81 countries worldwide through its websites.
While brick-and-mortar stores are its backbone, the retailer’s eCommerce website is the public face of the business. Even a few minutes of downtime in eCommerce operations can erode the trust of customers worldwide, damaging its brand and significantly impacting sales.
The specialty retailer faced three major challenges:
- In the highly competitive retail sector, the company could not afford downtime on its Commerce website — especially during the holidays, when it earns the bulk of its annual revenue
- The retailer had volumes of untouched IT operational data that they wanted to leverage for real-time decision-making
- The company’s high-profile brand makes it a target for people looking to exploit security vulnerabilities. The company needed to ensure its systems and customer data were secure and that they could respond to a cyberattack should one occur.
Solution
OnX helped the retailer deploy Splunk technology for operational intelligence and enterprise security to quickly resolve system issues while strengthening its security posture.
The retailer turned to OnX, whose in-depth Splunk expertise ensured they could get the technology they wanted in the tight timeframe that they needed it.
Because Splunk can do so many things for so many different kinds of clients, the specialty retailer needed help figuring out how to fine-tune Splunk to their precise needs. OnX’s OnDemand Residency Services team provided on-site assistance with Splunk certified consultants who have extensive experience deploying the technology.
Partnering with OnX and Splunk, the retailer outlined three objectives for its IT operations and overall business:
- Simplify Business Operations: Coordinating and correlating data from multiple IT operations to find inefficiencies, streamline business processes and improve profitability
- Improve Client Experience: Ensure eCommerce performance is optimized to run 24×7 with minimal risk of downtime, particularly during peak times
- Minimize Security Risks: Ensure customer data is secure and system can detect potential cyber threats
Results
The specialty retailer now has a robust operational intelligence package that helps its IT staff identify intruders quickly and reduce their ability to cause trouble. They get it in the form of advanced enterprise security software that identifies anomalies on customers’ networks and helps them slam the door on would-be intruders. Correlating data from the entire IT enterprise helps Splunk find problems that other security technologies miss.
The implementation also had broad benefits for the retailer’s IT operations. Being able to diagnose real-time system problems quickly improves website uptime, protects the company’s brand, boosts customer satisfaction and makes it easier to project revenue and cash flow. For instance, OnX experts leveraged the Splunk platform to help the company defeat a persistent performance problem bedeviling its environment, with impressive results: a 40 percent reduction in server load.
This fix freed up much more bandwidth for even more Splunk capabilities. This is crucial because the more data sources Splunk tracks, the more powerful it becomes. Just as important, resolving this performance problem also translated into an immediate ROI, because it eliminated the retailer’s need to purchase more hardware.