Industry

Microsoft solutions for Retail

Stores, warehouse, and head office on one estate, with card data properly fenced off.

Context

What this sector is dealing with

Retail estates are wide and thin: many sites, high staff turnover, shared devices, and a payment environment that carries its own compliance regime. Head office wants one view of stock and customers, while every store needs to keep trading if the connection drops.

We bring the Microsoft stack across the whole estate, from tills and handhelds to the analytics behind them, with the segmentation that keeps card data out of scope where it belongs.

Pressures

The problems we get called in for

High staff turnover

Accounts and devices change hands constantly, so joiners and leavers has to be automated or it will not happen.

Card data compliance

PCI DSS scope creeps quietly unless the network and identity boundaries are drawn deliberately.

Shared store devices

Tills, handhelds, and back office PCs are shared by design, which breaks assumptions built for one user per device.

Seasonal peaks

Capacity and cost both spike, and cloud spend needs to flex without a surprise in January.

Microsoft solutions

What Microsoft brings to retail

The products that genuinely apply to this sector, and what each one is actually for here. Much of this sits inside licensing you may already hold.

Microsoft Intune

Shared device mode for tills and back office PCs, Android Enterprise dedicated enrolment for store handhelds, and kiosk configuration for customer-facing screens. Compliance policy plus Autopilot means a store gets a working device without a visit from IT.

Microsoft Entra ID

Conditional Access with location and device conditions, so head office systems are reachable from a managed store device and not from a personal laptop. Lifecycle workflows automate the joiners and leavers process that high turnover makes unmanageable by hand.

Microsoft Dynamics 365

Commerce for point of sale and unified retail operations, Supply Chain Management for inventory, and Customer Insights for the loyalty and personalisation work that lives on top of it.

Microsoft Defender XDR

Endpoint protection across a wide store estate and Defender for Office 365 against invoice and payment fraud aimed at head office finance.

Microsoft Power BI

Sales, stock, and store performance from live data, so regional managers work from the same numbers as head office rather than a weekly export.

Microsoft Azure

Segmented landing zones that keep the cardholder environment fenced, with scaling and cost controls sized for seasonal peaks.

How we help

Typical engagements in this sector

The projects we are most often brought in to deliver for retail, from full implementations to targeted uplifts.

01

Store device rollout with Intune

Shared device mode for tills and back office, dedicated enrolment for handhelds, and kiosk configuration for customer screens across the estate.

02

Dynamics 365 Commerce or Business Central

Point of sale, inventory, and finance in one system, sized to the estate rather than to a template.

03

PCI DSS scope reduction

Network and identity segmentation so the cardholder environment stays as small as it can reasonably be.

04

Power BI retail analytics

One live view of sales and stock across stores, replacing the reporting pack assembled by hand every Monday.

Compliance

Frameworks that shape the work

These are the frameworks and regulations we most often design against in retail. We map Microsoft controls to the framework you are actually held to, and build the evidence trail as we go rather than reconstructing it the week before an audit.

PCI

PCI DSS

Protection of cardholder data. Scope is everything here, and the cheapest control is a boundary that keeps systems out of scope.

GDPR

GDPR and UK GDPR

Lawful handling of personal data, with real duties around retention, subject access, and breach notification timelines.

ISO

ISO 27001

The information security management standard most enterprise buyers and auditors ask for by name. It wants a system, not a set of tools.

CE+

Cyber Essentials Plus

A UK baseline that is independently tested, and increasingly a condition of winning public sector and enterprise contracts.

Working in retail? Let us look at your estate.

Book a discovery call and we will walk through what you already own, what is switched on, and where the gaps are that matter in your sector.