Huawei's Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution Helps Germany's Klaas & Kock Build a Next-Generation Secure Retail Network

Klaas & Kock (K+K) is a German food retailer based in Gronau, Westphalia. Founded in 1950, the company now operates 215 stores across the region. Currently, K+K is ranked among the top 30 food retailers in Germany based on revenue. K+K employs more than 7000 individuals and maintains a fleet of over 120 vehicles, serving all sales locations daily. This ensures that customers consistently enjoy high-quality, fresh food and friendly service at competitive prices.

K+K Must Enhance Its Digital Service Experience and Bolster Store Network Security

As the retail business continues to expand and digital service requirements increase, the existing network architecture of K+K can no longer support secure and reliable service operation. The headquarters and more than 200 stores are facing the following key challenges:

Stores rely on a single link, making it difficult to ensure service continuity

The headquarters and stores need to exchange tens of thousands of pieces of product transaction and user information every day. Especially during peak promotion periods, core service traffic and other data compete for bandwidth on a single link, resulting in transaction transmission delays and severely affecting checkout efficiency and customer experience. Hence, it is imperative to establish an intelligent uplink selection mechanism for backup links to guarantee stable and reliable service delivery.

The risks associated with public network access are significant, highlighting the critical need for refined management and control

The open Wi-Fi networks in stores are connected by a large number of employees and customers. Network abuse may cause system intrusion and critical information leakage. A security protection system that can accurately filter URLs is in urgent need to improve network experience and protect corporate reputation from being damaged by possible attacks.

Siloed O&M platforms for branch stores lead to inefficient security responses

K+K operates over 200 branches and collaborates with 50 suppliers. Currently, security events are reviewed manually, resulting in response times that span several weeks. This approach significantly hinders the timeliness and accuracy of security event analysis and handling. Consequently, there is a critical need for an automated, centralized management platform to enhance both the speed and precision of these processes.

To address the preceding challenges, K+K actively promotes network architecture upgrade and comprehensively enhances network security protection to ensure service continuity and lay a solid foundation for continuous service growth in the future.

Building an Intelligent Security Protection System to Strengthen the Foundation of Digital Services

Based on the actual service requirements of K+K, Huawei uses the Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution to build an end-to-end intelligent security protection system for them. The iMaster NCE network-security converged management and control platform, in conjunction with the USG6600F and USG6500F series firewalls, provides unified O&M and collaborative protection for branch and headquarters networks. This solution facilitates the creation of a robust security framework that ensures high-quality service experiences, precise Internet access control, and easy deployment and maintenance. It lays a solid foundation for fostering service innovation and sustainable growth.

Intelligent link scheduling to ensure seamless service continuity during switchovers

Faced with the long-term stability bottleneck of a single MPLS link, Huawei's intelligent link switchover function demonstrates excellent reliability. The system seamlessly switches between MPLS and LTE links in seconds, guaranteeing no service disruption. Based on real-time link quality monitoring and identification of more than 6000 application features, the system can automatically select the optimal path based on service priorities. This not only eliminates the risk of single points of failure, but also builds a highly reliable branch network with elastic self-healing capabilities for K+K, achieving intelligent awareness and seamless switchover.

Intelligent URL filtering, for enhanced Internet access control

The custom URL filtering database of the USG firewalls has over 560 million URLs and 2 million malicious domain names, effectively mitigating public network misuse. This ensures smooth running of key services such as POS transactions and inventory synchronization, while ensuring the Internet access experience of employees and customers, and improving the security and reliability of the network access environment.

Unified network and security management significantly enhances O&M efficiency

Huawei's unified iMaster NCE-Campus controller centralizes management of both network and security devices. Compared to the previous multi-platform approach, the Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution substantially enhances operational efficiency. By deeply integrating network and security functions, we achieve unified management of threat analysis and response. This approach eliminates the need for cross-platform handling and significantly reduces troubleshooting time, resulting in an 80% decrease in security O&M costs.

Shaping a Secure and Resilient Retail Future Through Intelligence

The in-depth collaboration between K+K and Huawei has not only effectively addressed the challenges faced by large-scale retail networks in terms of stability, security, and O&M efficiency, but also set a benchmark for digital transformation in the retail industry with its innovative SASE architecture. The Huawei Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution, leveraging its key capabilities in intelligent link scheduling, precise Internet access control, and unified management and O&M, has enabled K+K to establish a next-generation enterprise network characterized by prioritized user experience, robust security and control, and streamlined O&M operations.

Looking ahead, K+K will continue to work with Huawei to further explore smart retail and omni-channel services, and support continuous service innovation with secure and reliable digital infrastructure. This will also provide forward-looking successful practices for global retail enterprises to move towards intelligent and resilient development.