Network Automation for Retail
Prevent Outages, Eliminate Change Risks, and Secure Every Transaction
Drive operational efficiency, ensure uptime, and accelerate change across your entire retail network.
Empower your retail network with adaptive automation that ensures uptime, streamlines change, and dramatically reduces incidents. Transform complex, distributed retail networks into reliable, self-healing systems — from store to cloud.
What does network automation mean for retail IT?
Retail network automation uses no-code workflows to manage, troubleshoot, and secure complex retail networks across stores, warehouses, data centers, and clouds. NetBrain automates incident response, validates network changes, and continuously enforces compliance — helping retailers cut downtime, reduce MTTR, and keep every transaction flowing.
The Retail Network Challenge: Maintaining Consistent Uptime Across Stores
Modern retail networks are complex, distributed ecosystems. Manual processes simply can’t keep up, leading to:
- Prolonged outages: Slow, manual troubleshooting increases mean time to repair (MTTR), directly affecting sales and operations.
- Risky changes: Manual upgrades and configuration changes are error-prone and often lead to costly downtime.
- Alert fatigue: IT teams face thousands of generic alerts daily, making it hard to identify and prioritize real issues.
Real-world data: An analysis of 25,257 incidents over six months at a leading retailer revealed the scale of the challenge:
- 9,500+ Forti-Extender tunnel alerts
- 5,900+ wireless device polling failures
- 4,900+ SDN model issues
- 4,500+ general device polling failures
Proactively Ensure Always-On Store Connectivity
Gain Instant, End-to-End Visibility
See every store, distribution center, and cloud endpoint in real time on a dynamic map — removing blind spots and speeding up incident response.
Troubleshoot Visually and Reduce MTTR
Pinpoint root causes instantly and run automations directly from the map. Resolve issues up to 5× faster and enable L1 teams to fix problems without escalation.
Automate Ticket Resolution in Your NOC
Integrate with ServiceNow and other ITSM tools to auto-diagnose and resolve incidents — accelerating ticket closure and cutting manual work.
Automate and De-Risk Network Changes
Run pre-change checks, execute changes without errors, and verify instantly. Roll back automatically if needed to keep store operations safe.
Ensure Continuous Compliance and Security
Continuously validate configurations, detect drift in real time, and auto-remediate issues before they become vulnerabilities or audit failures.
Enable a Self-Healing Network
Enable auto-remediation from automation results. Trigger diagnostics from relevant tickets and alerts—like automatically diagnosing a path when an SD-WAN tunnel goes down. This drastically reduces mean time to repair (MTTR).
Success Story How a Fortune 500 Retailer Eliminated Risk During Network Changes and Reduced Manual Work
A major off-price retailer replaced slow, error-prone manual processes with NetBrain’s automated change defense system — effectively turning the platform into a “Quality Assurance department” for their network. The solution provides a triple-layer defense:
- Pre-Change: Automated readiness checks with Go/No-Go decisions.
- During Change: Standardized execution eliminates human error.
- Post-Change: Instant validation ensures network stability.
This approach prevents unintended issues, enables in-window rollback, and keeps store operations protected — delivering an estimated 80% ROI.
Results achieved:
- 30% of incidents fully automated
- 6,394 engineering hours saved every 6 months
- 43% of incidents automatically triaged
- 36,293 hours of manual L1 work eliminated
Get Started with NetBrain
Watch & Learn
See NetBrain in action immediately with our on-demand demo. Get a first look at network automation, AI, and real-time observability.
Interact & Experience
Get a deeper look, and interact with our team as they guide you through a detailed demo of intent-based AI-driven network automation.
Upload & Discover
Securely upload your network data, run golden assessments, gain AI insights, and solve your toughest problems—guided 1-on-1 by an expert.Frequently Asked Questions
- What is network automation for retail?
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Retail network automation uses no-code workflows to manage, troubleshoot, and secure networks across stores, warehouses, data centers, and cloud environments. It reduces manual work, prevents downtime, and accelerates network changes.
- How does NetBrain help retailers improve uptime?
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NetBrain’s solution proactively detects and diagnoses connectivity issues across branches, WAN links, and SD-WAN environments, triggering automated remediation to maintain store uptime.
- How does NetBrain help retailers reduce downtime?
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NetBrain automates incident diagnosis and resolution, significantly cutting mean time to repair (MTTR) and reducing outages caused by manual troubleshooting or risky changes.
- Can NetBrain integrate with existing ITSM tools?
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Yes. NetBrain integrates with ServiceNow and other ITSM platforms to trigger automated workflows directly from tickets, accelerating incident triage and resolution.
- Can this solution support SD-WAN and hybrid networks?
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Yes. NetBrain integrates with SD-WAN and hybrid network infrastructures to deliver complete visibility, configuration management, and automated diagnostics across distributed retail networks.
- How does it enhance network security and compliance?
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NetBrain continuously validates network configurations against retail compliance standards (like PCI-DSS), ensuring that network changes do not expose vulnerabilities or impact security policies.
- Is the automation customizable for different retail environments?
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Yes. IT teams can define custom automation rules and workflows tailored to store size, devices, or applications—ensuring flexible, scalable network operations.
- How does NetBrain compare to competitors?
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Compared to Forward Networks, which focuses primarily on network modeling and intent verification, NetBrain adds intelligent automation that actively diagnoses and resolves issues in real time. Unlike Auvik or SolarWinds, NetBrain offers deep multi-site automation designed for retail-scale environments.