Solutions

Stonesoft Solutions for the Retail Industry

Reduced risk of business downtime

The StoneGate solution provides secure connections between different store locations and ensures that the connectivity is always there.

StoneGate's patented Multi-Link feature allows several low-cost connection providers to be used between stores, so it does not matter if some disaster knocks down an Internet provider; the connectivity is still there through remaining providers. That actually happened to one of our customers in Bermuda during a hurricane. Their business was not affected.

One of the major reasons for business downtime is the need for constant security updates. StoneGate solutions are clustered and there is no need for downtime when they will be updated or even upgraded to a new version. Business in not interrupted for any reasons and there is no single point of failure.

Retailers create new "value networks" that connect several retailers together and help them to better serve the customer. This requires active connections between retailers.

StoneGate solutions are proven to be easily interoperable with other security devices. One proof of this is ICSA's IPSec certificate, which manifests that StoneGate solutions can create secure connections (Virtual Private Networks) with other leading security manufacturers.

Read more about meeting compliance requirements

Reduced total cost of ownership (TCO) for retail firm's distributed environment

A big part of the total cost of ownership comes from personnel costs. Retailers that grow their market share and increase the number of their remote locations have to go along with the personnel they have. Small margins do not allow hiring new personnel. StoneGate solutions come with centralized management that allows easy management of hundreds of devices from a central location. Innovations like remote upgrade and automatic policy rollback allows retailers to increase the number of stores without increasing the number of IT staff. Thus, most stores do not need to have specialized IT staff, as all necessary actions can be done from a central location.

Payment security and regulatory compliance

The Payment Card Industry (PCI) Data Security Standard requires that anybody who accepts and processes credit card information should implement network security best practices. StoneGate solutions help retailers to comply with this and other security standards. StoneGate products are ICSA and Common Criteria certified.

An audit trail is a basic need for regulatory compliance. Stonesoft's StoneGate products provide clear audit trails for administrative actions. Internal and external auditors can receive clear and precise reports where they can find evidence for regulatory compliance and its effectiveness. These reports save a lot of evaluation time and can be used as part of the compliance report. The reports are based on StoneGate logs where auditors can find more detailed information about the specific event in case they want to take a closer look at details.