Cybersecurity extends far beyond data centers and workstations. Industries like retail and food service depend on myriad interconnected technologies to serve their customers, not least the point-of-sale (POS) systems that process transactions in stores. The uninterrupted operation of these systems is critical to driving business revenue and continuity at the franchise level.
Restaurants, clothing stores, pharmacies, supermarkets—businesses like these process hundreds of transactions every day, handling volumes of customer data, including financial and personally identifying information (PII). For these companies, the integrity of POS systems is key not only to making sales, but also to ensuring the security of customer information.
Creating the Platform
A global restaurant chain sought a single provider of endpoint security for both their corporate network and domestic franchises. Rather than a fully managed solution, the company wanted a partner to design, implement, and monitor a system to be used by internal personnel in the day-to-day management of cybersecurity.
The company chose ECS to design and configure an endpoint security system, a project covering thousands of user endpoints and POS systems across the country. After close planning with company leadership, ECS built out a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) solution in Amazon Web Services (AWS) to host and maintain the company’s cyber integrity at both the corporate and franchise levels.
Ongoing Protection
ECS provides a fully hosted PaaS system that enables our client to manage endpoint security across their corporate network. The ECS cybersecurity team maintains the system’s infrastructure using a suite of proven and advanced technologies, including the McAfee products long relied on by the customer.
While this centralized platform provides critical overarching support, what about franchise-level POS systems, which are deployed in a dynamic environment across a wide variety of operating systems all across the country? To secure these disparate POS systems, ECS provides application control. By creating a whitelist—determining which applications the system can run, to the exclusion of all others—these products minimize the risk of malicious actors gaining access to sensitive information through unsecure software.
For companies that serve their customers through in-store transactions, cybersecurity means more than protection at the corporate level. Only through the use of secure, reliable POS systems can these companies gain and keep their customers’ trust, and process the sales that increase revenue and drive growth.
