Veritas
Protecting supermarket and warehouse systems
Climate-related network risk: Natural disasters, power outages, local infrastructure disruption, loss of on-premise IT systems and interruption to warehouse, retail and stock-management systems
Solution pathway: Cloud-based disaster recovery, continuous replication, multi-region hosting, automated recovery and disaster recovery testing
Business type: Supermarket chain and food distribution business
Sector: Grocery retail, food distribution, warehouse management and retail IT
Geography: Spain
In practice
Retail and food distribution businesses depend on digital systems to coordinate stock, sales, reporting, replenishment and warehouse activity. If those systems go down, the disruption can quickly affect shops, suppliers, warehouse teams and customers. In grocery and food distribution, this can also increase waste and reduce the ability to move essential products efficiently.
Veritas, a Spanish organic supermarket chain, previously hosted its IT operations on-premise. This created exposure to system downtime if the company’s own infrastructure was affected by a major disruption. While cyber risk was an important driver, the disaster recovery approach was also designed to account for physical disruption, including natural disasters that can damage or disable company IT infrastructure.
Working with technology partner Zoi, Veritas moved its disaster recovery system to the AWS cloud. The project protected the main systems used to manage stock, warehouse operations, sales at the checkout and business reporting. These are essential to keeping stores and distribution operations running, so restoring them quickly after an outage was a key priority.
The solution used AWS Elastic Disaster Recovery with continuous block-level replication. This means copies of on-premise servers are continuously replicated in the cloud. If a disaster affects the original systems, recovery can be orchestrated in AWS with low recovery time.
For climate and nature-related risk, the relevance is that Veritas reduced dependence on a single on-premise IT environment. If a local site, server room or data infrastructure is affected by flooding, storms, power failure or another physical hazard, critical systems can be recovered from cloud infrastructure instead of waiting for the original site to be restored.
The case is useful for this section because it shows a practical route for businesses that depend on warehouse management systems, ERP, reporting and point-of-sale systems. Digital resilience requires knowing which systems are business-critical, setting recovery targets, replicating data, automating recovery and testing the process before a disruption occurs.
Why this example was selected
This case study was curated because it provides a detailed, publicly documented example of a retailer protecting the digital systems that underpin sales, reporting, stock management and warehouse operations. Zoi’s implementation case study describes how Veritas moved from relying entirely on its own onsite IT infrastructure to a cloud-based recovery system covering stock management, warehouse operations, checkout sales and business reporting.
The project used continuous block-level replication, automated recovery orchestration, multi-region cloud capability and disaster recovery testing. Zoi reports that the system was implemented and validated in less than three months, with recovery point objectives measured in seconds and recovery time objectives measured in minutes. The case is particularly relevant because the solution was designed to protect against more than cyber incidents: Zoi explicitly identifies natural disasters as a potential cause of damage to company IT infrastructure.
The example is valuable for the Business Knowledge Hub because it shows how a retailer can reduce dependence on a single on-premise IT environment without constructing a second physical data centre. It demonstrates a practical resilience pathway for businesses whose warehouse, stock, reporting and customer systems must be recovered quickly after local infrastructure disruption.
Key lesson
Businesses should identify which digital systems are essential to keep warehouses, stock and customer operations running, then design disaster recovery around those systems. Cloud replication, multi-region hosting and tested recovery processes can reduce dependence on vulnerable on-premise infrastructure.
