Target Outages Illustrate Retail's Growing Tech Complexity
June 17 2019 - 5:43PM
Dow Jones News
By Sara Castellanos
The technical problems at Target Corp. stores over the weekend
illustrate the challenge of unifying a large retailer's technology
infrastructure with its bricks-and-mortar presence and underscore
the importance of having trusted vendors and backup plans.
Target's checkout systems suffered a nationwide outage for about
two hours on Saturday due to a problem during routine maintenance
of its computer systems.
On Sunday, an unrelated problem cropped up: Some card payments
at certain stores couldn't be processed for about an hour and a
half because of a problem at a third-party vendor.
"Nobody is immune to an outage like this," said Joanne Joliet,
senior research director at Gartner Inc.
That's in part because large retailers rely on third-party
vendors for various technology solutions, and because of the innate
complexity that comes with the convergence of online and offline
environments, she said.
Shopping outages as a result of technical problems have become
prevalent both online and in physical stores in recent years,
causing problems particularly on peak shopping days.
Routine technology maintenance has become more complicated
because systems are not isolated from each other. "They're all
integrated...which introduces greater complexity," Ms. Joliet
said.
For example, a point-of-sale system could be connected to an
order-management system and an enterprise resource planning system,
she said. Disruptions to one system could cause ripple effects,
which is why testing is critical but also increasingly complex, Ms.
Joliet said.
Target said Sunday's hiccup came as NCR Corp., a vendor it uses
to help accept payments, experienced an issue at one of its data
centers. NCR didn't respond to a request for comment.
Reliance on third-party vendors requires more trust than ever
before, Ms. Joliet said: "Trust in that partner is just as critical
as the technical functionality."
It's imperative that business continuity and disaster recovery
plans are in place in service agreements between companies and
third-party vendors so outages don't last long, she said.
Enterprise-technology executives should ensure that third-party
vendors are in "lockstep with the plan" for disaster recovery, said
Anna Frazzetto, chief digital technology officer of technology
solutions at IT offshoring, IT recruitment and executive search
firm Harvey Nash Inc.
"Enterprises have to challenge third-party vendors and hold them
to service [agreements]," Ms. Frazzetto said, adding that there
should be financial penalties for not adhering to those
agreements.
Target said it knew many customers had a "frustrating shopping
experience" at its stores over the weekend. "We're working
tirelessly to ensure these issues don't happen again," the company
said.
Write to Sara Castellanos at sara.castellanos@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
June 17, 2019 17:28 ET (21:28 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2019 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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