AT&T’s latest survey shed light on how the retail sector is harnessing the power of edge computing to enhance efficiency, security and customer experiences. It also reports that over half (51%) of the respondents are shifting toward secure access service edge (SASE) solutions.

The 2023 Edge Ecosystem report from AT&T Cybersecurity collected data from 201 retail respondents out of over 1,400 global security practitioners and one of the key findings is that 51% of surveyed organizations use combined cybersecurity controls and networking functions in the cloud.

This indicates that the retailers are moving more to the SASE approach in the cloud, Theresa Lanowitz, head of cybersecurity evangelism at AT&T Business told SDxCentral. While the survey did not specifically inquire about SASE adoption, “you can take that logical step and say: yeah, they're probably alluding to the fact that they're using some SASE.”

Forrester noted in its zero-trust edge Wave report that SASE is now well-suited for organizations with distributed small sites like retailers, retail banks and gas stations. Gartner Distinguished VP Andrew Lerner also told SDxCentral in an earlier interview that currently, organizations who are actively investing in SASE tend to be smaller and mid-market ones in healthcare, finance, manufacturing and retail.

“I think what you see with retail, you have a lot of branch offices, so to speak, so you have a lot of distribution and retail,” Lanowitz said. “SASE is really well-suited for those branch offices to not having to backhaul everything back to the data center.”

So it fits “that idea of a completely modernized network and unified security and delivering on that digital-first experience for the customers in that retail environment,” she added.

In 2021, AT&T announced a single-vendor, managed SASE services beginning with Fortinet and later added Palo Alto Networks and Cisco as partners. Lanowitz noted the managed SASE can further offer retailers the security expertise they need.

“With managed SASE, you have experts who are looking at this every single day,” she said. “ So you have our SOC [security operation center] analysts who have the latest certifications. They're seeing this on a day-in-day-out basis.”

Security is no longer an afterthought in edge computing

In the survey, retail respondents identified real-time inventory management as their primary use case for edge computing. This application involves tracking the location of specific items, monitoring their status and updating records in near-real-time as changes occur.

“We define edge computing, for the purpose of this report, as its software-defined, so it's either on-prem or in the cloud, [and] your workloads, your hosting, your applications, it's closer to where that data is being generated and consumed,” Theresa said.

She added three to five years ago, security was often an afterthought in technology implementations. However, the emergence of edge computing has transformed security into a business requirement. “If we look at the overall budget for edge computing, any retailer who is doing any type of edge computing, they are including security as part of that plan.”

Retailers identify DDoS attacks as top security concern

Security remains a top concern for retailers, and distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks are particularly worrisome, as they can disrupt operations and impact the entire supply chain.

Meanwhile, personal computers are the top endpoint retailers, accounting for 51% of the device category, according to AT&T’s report. “If an adversary is able to gain access through a DDoS attack to that personal computer, they could potentially just move laterally through the network,” Theresa said.

“Since DDoS is the top concern from an attack perspective of retail organizations, they need to make sure that they are really bolstered in terms of their defenses with making sure that they're using proper DDoS controls,” she added.

Retail organizations should implement security solutions such as multifactor authentication (MFA), identity and access management, DDoS prevention, security hygiene training and managed extended detection and response (XDR).

Other top security concerns for retail include insider threats and business email compromise.

Theresa pointed out that the whole survey series aggregates data across various industries including healthcare, the state, local and education (SLED), manufacturing, transportation, energy and utilities. DDoS attacks emerged as the primary security concern in edge computing across all these industries.