The Era of Proactive Network Operations
For decades, network teams have been fighting fires with limited visibility. We can see devices, interfaces, and links, but we’ve been missing the most critical piece: understanding what the network...
In retail, the network is the backbone of every transaction, customer interaction, and operational process. Downtime halts revenue, affects customer trust, and impacts brand reputation. Outages also affect backend systems, disrupting inventory updates, supply chain coordination, and reporting.
Beyond lost revenue, outages introduce security risks, delay inventory updates, and disrupt supply chain visibility. Even brief disruptions can impact multiple stores, delay transactions, and erode brand trust.
To reduce Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and limit business impact, retailers are turning to platforms like NetBrain. By automating diagnostics and mapping dependencies in real time, NetBrain helps IT teams pinpoint root causes faster and restore service before downtime escalates.
The Impact of Retail Network Outages
Unlike other industries, a retail network outage is immediately visible at the register, online checkout, or inventory scanner. Outages can often strike during the worst times, around holidays or during promotions, adding to frustration and revenue losses.
In recent months, we’ve witnessed several network outages affecting major retailers. Some of the impacts include:
- Lost revenue due to failed transactions.
- Missed sales during peak shopping periods.
- Customer frustration and reduced brand trust.
- Higher support costs from increased service requests.
- Productivity loss across teams relying on digital systems.
- Delays in store operations, inventory management, and logistics.
The Cost of Downtime
The Uptime Institute’s 2024 report highlights that while the frequency of outages is gradually declining, their financial impact is increasing:
- About 16% of organizations experienced outages costing more than $1 million.
- More than half (54%) of surveyed organizations report their most recent significant outage cost over $100,000.
- A significant majority (80%) believe that better management, processes, and configuration could have prevented their most serious outages.
Manual network design and configuration are subject to basic human error that can bring any system down. Layered onto that is the sensitivity of today’s networks. Modern networks are handling traffic levels unimaginable a decade ago, but they can also be undone by the slightest of missteps. In fact, we’ve seen large networks, such as AWS, a large cloud service provider, go down because of a simple coding error. In AWS’s case, that outage reportedly cost companies $150 million.
The cost of downtime can vary based on circumstances like company size and industry, but unplanned downtime can cripple any business. This is especially true for retail companies that rely heavily on high-level data transactions to operate their businesses.
Downtime is now a board-level concern as the cost per incident grows. Business leaders and executives are demanding faster recovery strategies. There’s increasing urgency to shorten resolution times through better diagnostics, visibility, and automation.
How long does it typically take to restore service to users after network outages?
Source: 2017 State of the Network Engineer Report
Accelerate MTTR with NetBrain Automation
Network outages are costly, and traditional troubleshooting only makes things worse — it’s slow, repetitive, and often blind to how traffic flows. Engineers spend valuable time jumping between devices, retracing steps at every support tier, and trying to piece together the full picture. This manual approach delays resolution and drives up downtime costs. Automated troubleshooting from NetBrain changes that.
- With NetBrain, you can automatically collect, analyze, and visualize CLI and SNMP data with automated diagnostics. Quickly identify a speed/duplex mismatch, increasing interface errors, duplicate OSPF IDs, or misconfigured AS numbers for a BGP neighbor connection.
- Automation can improve MTTR by expediting the collection, analysis, and visualization of the problem at hand. For enterprise networks, reducing MTTR by even small increments can make a massive difference to an organization’s bottom line.
Minimize Downtime and Outage Costs with NetBrain
NetBrain’s automated platform makes threat identification and troubleshooting possible within minutes to minimize the impact and cost of network outages. Retail enterprises benefit from faster recovery, reduced downtime and associated costs, and a more resilient customer experience.
Schedule a demo today and watch how it works — no guesswork, just smarter, faster NetOps.