Retail chain infrastructure overhaul

Retail doesn't get to pause. Forty-plus stores were taking payments every hour the doors were open — and the infrastructure beneath them had quietly become the biggest risk in the business.

The challenge

The group had grown store by store, and its technology had grown the same way — one server room, one firewall, one set of assumptions bolted on after another. Point-of-sale slowed to a crawl at peak. Store networks were flat and unsegmented, so a problem in one location could reach the others. Backups existed but had never been tested end to end. And with card data flowing through every till, the absence of a formal security posture had become impossible to ignore.

Leadership wanted three things at once: modernise the platform, close the security gaps, and prove to partners that the business was audit-ready — all without a single hour of disruption to trading.

You cannot switch off forty tills to fix the plumbing underneath them.

What we did

We started with a two-week discovery sprint across a representative sample of stores, mapping every dependency before touching production. From there we ran a phased, zero-downtime migration — moving core workloads to AWS store cluster by store cluster, each behind a tested rollback plan, each cut over outside trading hours and verified before the next began.

• Phased lift-and-reshape migration of core systems to AWS, with infrastructure defined in Terraform so every store is provisioned the same way.
• Secure, segmented multi-store networking — each site isolated, centrally managed, and connected over an encrypted overlay rather than a flat shared network.
• A SOC 2 readiness programme: access controls, logging, change management and documented runbooks brought up to audit standard.
• Centralised monitoring and alerting across all locations, so the team sees an issue at store 31 before the store manager calls it in.
• A managed IT handover — proactive patching, backups tested on a schedule, and a named team on call.

"Glisto revamped our entire IT infrastructure and their cybersecurity work gave us real peace of mind. They operate like part of our team." — Operations Director

The outcome

The cutover completed with zero unplanned downtime — no store lost a trading hour, and the finance team only noticed the change when point-of-sale got faster. The group now runs on a modern, monitored platform with security controls mapped to SOC 2, and a managed support arrangement that catches problems before they reach the shop floor.

• Zero unplanned downtime across the entire migration.
• SOC 2-ready controls, evidenced and documented for audit.
• Faster point-of-sale response at peak trading.
• Single-pane monitoring and tested backups across all 40+ stores.
• 24/7 managed IT, with a named senior contact.