Skip to main content
Industry

How to empower all your retail employees securely with Azure Active Directory

Retail_AAD_1

This is certainly an exciting time to be in the retail industry, with transformative opportunities to connect with and win today’s shoppers, control costs, drive profitability, and secure access to data. Armed with the latest technologies at their fingertips, the key to driving today’s in-store transformation remains its employees.

To succeed, it’s never been more important to provide everyone with the tools and information they need, when they need it, to drive your business forward. And leading retailers and grocers are recognizing this.

In Retail Systems Research’s most recent store benchmark survey, educating and empowering in-store employees using technology has jumped to the top of the priority list for all respondents.

But this is easier said than done in an industry with tens of millions of workers. With constant staff turnover and a high percentage of seasonal employees, managing data access and digital identities can be overwhelming. In addition to increasing productivity, retailers also need to strike the right balance between access for all and security.

Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Premium (AADP) is a great tool to do that.

AADP provides single sign-on to thousands of cloud (SaaS) apps and access to web apps you run on-premises. It features multi-factor authentication (MFA); access control based on user location and user groups; and holistic security reports, audits, alerts and device health. Built for ease of use, AADP’s robust, self-service capabilities for employees can also help reduce costs, including saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in helpdesk support.

Working with our global retail customers, we’ve developed new resources to help you take advantage of AADP to increase productivity for all your retail employees, while meeting the needs for identity-enabled security and scalability. 

This series of three new guides, available now, include best practices from some of the largest retailers around the world and give you deployment choices based on your existing infrastructure. You can access them here.

And when it comes to retail and managing identity for tens or hundreds of thousands of employees we understand this also needs to be cost-effective. Providing an economically feasible solution is something we’ve factored into our approach. Please ask your Microsoft Account representative to get started with a rapid pilot and offer for retail.  

You can also learn more about AADP and identity management for the retail industry in this new post on the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility and Security Blog.

LinkedIn: Tracy Issel