For retailers, delivering these experiences demands more than just good intentions. It requires resilient, intelligent infrastructure capable of supporting unified platforms, secure data flows, and real-time responsiveness across the retail ecosystem.
The High Stakes of Omnichannel
Omnichannel isn’t just about customer convenience—it’s become a commercial imperative. A Forrester report found that omnichannel customers spend 10% more online and 4% more in-store than single-channel customers. Yet many retailers still struggle with fragmented systems, inconsistent customer data, and legacy networks that slow them down.
Creating a truly seamless experience requires a coordinated backend infrastructure that unifies operations across:
- Ecommerce platforms
- Store systems (POS, kiosks, smart devices)
- Fulfilment (warehouses, delivery networks)
- Customer engagement (loyalty, mobile apps, chat)
- Data analytics and personalisation engines
The Role of Modern Infrastructure
Legacy infrastructure was never designed to support today’s omnichannel complexity. To stay competitive, retailers need to modernise their network, cloud, and security environments.
The most agile and digitally mature retail environments are built on modern infrastructure platforms that offer cloud-based management, robust security, and seamless scalability. These platforms enable retailers to standardise their technology stack, reduce complexity, and quickly roll out new capabilities across distributed sites.
For example, at Orro, we helped a major Australian retailer modernise and standardise infrastructure across hundreds of retail locations using Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed networking and security technologies. This enabled rapid deployment, high availability, consistent performance, and a secure foundation to support their evolving omnichannel strategy.
SD-WAN: The Glue That Binds the Channels
A key enabler of seamless omnichannel is Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN), which provides retailers with a secure, intelligent framework for connecting users to applications across diverse locations and cloud environments. SD-WAN addresses the challenges of legacy wide-area networks by dynamically routing traffic based on performance, ensuring critical applications receive the bandwidth and priority they need.
This becomes especially critical when customers are placing orders on mobile apps, checking in-store stock via kiosks, or interacting with personalised promotions. SD-WAN ensures these moments are underpinned by low-latency, high-performance connectivity that delivers a frictionless customer experience.
To enhance this even further, Cisco ThousandEyes adds a layer of powerful, end-to-end visibility into both application and network performance. Retailers gain proactive insight into the entire digital journey—from cloud to edge to in-store systems. This not only supports operational efficiency but also enables businesses to monitor and optimise the customer experience in real time, ensuring that omnichannel truly lives up to its promise of consistency, convenience, and quality.
Empowering Store Teams and Operations
Unified infrastructure also empowers store employees, who are often the difference between a good and great customer experience. Modern, intelligent networks should be equipped to manage thousands of mobile devices across distributed locations—keeping POS terminals, staff tablets, and interactive displays secure, connected, and up-to-date. This level of control and visibility is essential to ensuring operational consistency and reducing downtime.
With Orro’s support, our retail clients—spanning thousands of sites across metro, regional, and remote Australia—have been able to achieve exactly that. Managing such a broad footprint requires a robust, cloud-managed approach to ensure high availability and performance across every location, regardless of geography. We help enable secure staff communications through unified voice and video platforms, facilitate real-time inventory updates, and centralise the management of in-store technologies like digital signage, all from a single pane of glass.
Security Without Friction
As omnichannel expands, so does the attack surface. A holistic security approach is essential to safeguard customer data, protect brand trust, and maintain compliance with standards like PCI DSS. At a minimum, this should include secure identity and access management, network segmentation, DNS-layer protection, real-time threat detection, and endpoint security.
Many of these controls align with the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) framework, which integrates networking and security capabilities into a unified, cloud-delivered architecture. For retailers, this model provides consistent protection across in-store networks, ecommerce platforms, and remote endpoints.
Orro’s managed cybersecurity services—including our Security Operations Centre (SOC), threat detection, and managed XDR capabilities—help retail clients implement adaptive, layered defences. We support retailers across metro, regional, and remote Australia, delivering scalable, standards-aligned security architectures that protect what matters most while enabling innovation without compromise.
Real-World Experience: Major Australian Retailer
Our work with a major Australian retailer highlights how modernising and standardising infrastructure across hundreds of retail sites can enable faster innovation, increased agility, and consistent performance. Leveraging leading infrastructure and managed services—underpinned by Cisco Meraki’s cloud-managed network technology—Orro helped the retailer roll out new in-store and online customer experiences, ensuring high availability, secure connectivity, and operational efficiency across their retail footprint.
Critically, we also enabled comprehensive visibility, proactive monitoring, and rapid response capabilities across their omnichannel environment, helping the retailer maintain performance and deliver a consistent, high-quality experience at every touchpoint.
The results? Enhanced customer experience, greater operational resilience, and a robust platform ready to scale with their evolving omnichannel strategy.
Looking Ahead
Omnichannel is not a project with an end date—it’s a mindset that requires ongoing optimisation. The retailers who win in this space will be those who invest in intelligent, secure, and scalable infrastructure that adapts to their needs.
From SD-WAN and cloud-managed networking to application performance monitoring and advanced threat protection, Orro and Cisco provide the foundation to make omnichannel ambitions a reality.
Ready to deliver seamless experiences across every retail touchpoint? Speak to Orro about building an infrastructure that connects, protects, and powers your omnichannel future.
