Shoppers Stop is one of India’s largest retail chains of large-format department stores. Covering the length and breadth of India, it has 65 outlets in 26 key cities occupy - ing an aggregate retail space of approximately 2.7 million square feet. Shoppers Stop has not only been the pioneer in multi-brand retail space but, has also introduced various other types of retail formats in India since its inception in 1991. The company has specialty stores for books (Crossword), Hypermarket (Hypercity) home decor (Home Stop) and maternity & infant care (Mother Care).

The retail industry is very dynamic. With the competition in the Indian market intensifying, retail players have been regularly announcing schemes to attract customers. Maintaining the confidentiality of such plans and also of customer data is therefore extremely important.

“There are lots of offers and promotions announced by the com - pany. In the entire chain if there is one person leaking information, the competition can launch the offer before us. Data security is therefore of number one priority for us,” says Gopakumar Panicker, DGM, IT, Shoppers Stop. Shoppers Stop, which had been till now focusing on desktop, laptops and PoS (Point of Sales) security solutions, decided to secure its other critical infrastructure also.

“It was time we moved to the enterprise security suite,” recalls Panicker. Shoppers Stop evaluated several vendors and solutions before deciding to implement Trend Micro’s DLP, end-point encryption, and MDM products.

“There are lots of offers and promotions announced by the company. In the entire chain if there is one person leaking information, the competition can launch the offer before us. Data security is therefore of number one priority for us.”

Gopakumar Panicker,
DGM, IT, Shoppers Stop

While Shopper’s Stop evaluated other vendors also, the balance tilted in favour of Trend Micro because of several reasons. “Since we were already using Trend Micro’s products, we have a certain level of comfort with them. Besides, their products had a lower TCO and gelled well with our infrastructure,” says Anil Shankar, Sr. General Manager — Solutions & Technology.

Shoppers Stop had been using Trend Micro’s anti-virus for more than eight years. According to the retail giant the advantage of the anti-virus was that it was low in resource utilisation while at the same time it was performance intensive. Since the Point of Sale (PoS) systems does not have a high-end configuration, a low footprint anti-virus client helped the company to run operations without impacting PoS system performance.

Before implementing a virtualisation security solution, the IT team had to watch individual machine to ensure security and compliance.

“By implemented the virtualisation security solution on the hypervisor, there is now no need for tracking each machine as the solution tracks the traffic at the hypervisor level and ability to create security templates adds another dimension to virtualisation security” avers Shankar.

“Since we were already using Trend Micro’s products, we have a certain level of comfort with them. Besides, their products had a lower TCO and gelled well with our infrastructure.”

Anil Shankar,
Senior General Manager,
Solutions and Technology,
Shoppers Stop

The virtualisation solution has provided advanced server security for physical and virtual servers. It protects enter - prise applications and data from breaches and business disruptions without requiring emergency patching.

This comprehensive, centrally managed platform helps you simplify security operations while enabling regulatory compliance and accelerating the ROI of vir - tualization and cloud projects. The solution provides a lighter, more manageable way to secure VMs. The other benefits include — it strengthens security without additional footprint through agentless integrity moni - toring, intrusion prevention, firewall and anti-malware; frees staff from continually configuring, updating, and patching agents; and protects virtual servers and virtual desktops. The control manager has helped Shoppers Stop in managing the different security solutions from a central location.

“The control manager — a web-based management console that tracks security performance, reports mal - ware events and policy violations, and automates routine tasks — has helped us in streamlining the administra - tion of multiple security solutions,” says Panicker.

On the future plans, Shankar says, “We are in the process of rolling out the DLP solution, which should be completed in the next two months. The end-point encryption is also in the pipeline. We are also bringing other operational systems in this same management.”

“The DLP has a two-way approach. While traditional DLP solutions installed at the gateway target just a few protocols, client-based DLP solutions have a high resource utilisation. This DLP solution adds on to the anti-virus as a result, the incremental resource utilisa - tion will only be five percent,” adds Shankar.

“The control manager — a web-based management console that tracks security performance, reports malware events and policy violations, and automates routine tasks — has helped us in streamlining the administration of multiple security solution.”

Gopakumar Panicker,
DGM, IT, Shoppers Stop