One of the most common complaints we hear from retailers using legacy point-of-sale (POS) systems is the slow time to market for new features. Retailers often wait months—or even years—for vital updates, and even then, deploying those updates across an entire fleet of stores and terminals can be a cumbersome, disruptive process. This slow pace of innovation leaves retailers struggling to stay competitive in a fast-moving market.

At Extenda Retail, we’ve built Hii Retail with this challenge in mind. Our cloud-native design separates business logic from the frontend checkout applications, so retailers no longer need to push updates to every single POS terminal. By centralizing business logic in the cloud and distributing data dynamically, we ensure that retailers can roll out new features and improvements rapidly. However, we understand that this move toward cloud-native systems often brings with it a concern: what happens when there’s a disruption?

Every Shop Owner’s Fear: What If the System Goes Down?

The biggest fear we’ve encountered from retailers is simple: disruption at checkout. What happens if there’s a loss of internet connectivity, a cloud provider outage, or, worst of all, a successful cybersecurity attack? How will retailers ensure they can still serve their customers?

We’ve anticipated this concern in our design, and we’ve incorporated several layers of resiliency to ensure operations can continue, no matter what challenges arise. Our combination of Hii Retail Edge and LitePOS, along with Mobile POS, provides a level of redundancy and safety that far surpasses traditional POS systems. Let’s explore how these elements work together to provide both speed of innovation and resiliency in the face of disruptions.

Edge Solutions: Extending the Cloud to the Store

In traditional POS setups, data like product information, prices, and promotions must be pushed to every terminal in the fleet, creating a bottleneck for updates and increasing the chances of operational failure in the event of a network outage. Our Edge architecture solves this problem by allowing business logic to be processed at the store level, even when the connection to the cloud is interrupted.

With our Edge solution, critical data is always accessible locally at the store, enabling uninterrupted operation. This means that even if the store loses connectivity to the cloud, transactions can still be processed and customers can continue to be served. Edge computing ensures that retailers benefit from the flexibility and speed of cloud-native architecture without sacrificing the reliability they need at the store level.

LitePOS: Local Resiliency at Each Checkout

LitePOS further enhances this resiliency by providing a lightweight, local version of our core POS functionality. It’s designed to run directly on store hardware, ensuring that each terminal remains operational even in the event of a full loss of network connectivity.

For example, if the store experiences an extended outage, LitePOS allows terminals to keep processing transactions locally. This means that even in the worst-case scenario—where the checkout is completely cut off from the cloud and local network infrastructure—staff can continue checking out customers. LitePOS is engineered to meet essential retail transaction requirements without relying on constant connectivity, ensuring the basic functions of retail remain intact no matter the circumstances.

Although LitePOS is still under development, we expect it to be ready by mid-2025. As we approach completion, we’ll share more information on its release and capabilities. We’re excited about the potential it brings to further enhance the resiliency and operational continuity of our platform, and we can’t wait to bring it to market!

Mobile POS: Another Layer of Flexibility

In addition to Edge and LitePOS, our Hii Retail incorporates Mobile POS as a powerful tool for both customer engagement and resiliency. Mobile POS devices empower staff to better engage with customers directly on the shop floor, enhancing the shopping experience through personalized service and quick checkouts. However, Mobile POS also serves as a key resiliency option during adverse conditions.

These devices operate independently and can run on different platforms (e.g., iOS or Android), adding yet another layer of redundancy. If traditional checkouts experience issues, staff can seamlessly switch to mobile devices, which often have their own cellular connectivity, bypassing local network or infrastructure problems altogether.

This flexibility allows stores to continue serving customers from anywhere within the store, providing retailers with the assurance that, even in the most challenging situations, they can remain fully operational. By integrating Mobile POS into our broader resiliency strategy, retailers gain not only enhanced customer engagement tools but also an additional safeguard for business continuity.

Speed of Innovation Meets Safety

While resiliency is crucial, it doesn’t come at the expense of innovation. Our cloud-native design enables retailers to roll out new features faster than ever before, without having to worry about updating every POS terminal. By decoupling business logic from the frontend and leveraging cloud-based distribution, we’ve dramatically reduced the time required to bring new features to market.

Additionally, this architecture allows us to onboard new stores exponentially faster than legacy systems. For example, we recently rolled out our solution to 200 new retail stores in Spain in less than a month. This level of speed and scalability was impossible with traditional POS systems, but with Hii Retail’s cloud-native approach, it’s the new standard.

The Edge and LitePOS components allow us to maintain that speed while keeping the system resilient, ensuring innovation and operational safety go hand-in-hand.

Faster Recovery from Cybersecurity Threats

Another critical advantage of this architecture is its ability to recover rapidly from cybersecurity threats, such as ransomware attacks. In legacy systems, ransomware could bring down an entire fleet of terminals, making it impossible to process transactions until a recovery plan is manually implemented across every terminal.

With Hii Retail’s centralized architecture, recovery is exponentially faster. Since we don’t rely on pushing software to individual terminals, we can roll back to a stable version across the entire system almost instantly. If an attack does occur, the ability to quickly recover and restore functionality across all terminals minimizes the impact on operations. Additionally, our layered cybersecurity measures—including real-time monitoring, encryption, and self-healing capabilities—further reduce the likelihood of a successful attack.

A System Built for Resiliency and Innovation

At Extenda Retail, we’ve designed Hii Retail to address the dual challenges of speed and safety. Retailers no longer need to choose between faster innovation and operational stability. With our Edge and LitePOS solutions, combined with Mobile POS redundancy, we’ve created a system that ensures retailers can operate continuously, regardless of the challenges they face—whether it’s a network outage, a cloud provider issue, or even a cyberattack.

Our architecture is built to keep retailers operational in every scenario while allowing them to innovate faster and bring new features to market more quickly than ever before. The levels of resiliency we’ve embedded into Hii Retail ensure that retailers can face any disruption with confidence, knowing that they have multiple layers of safety in place to keep their business running smoothly.

Conclusion

We understand the concerns that come with cloud-native POS solutions, especially around the potential for disruptions at the checkout. That’s why we’ve designed Hii Retail with multiple layers of resiliency to keep retailers operational no matter what. Whether it’s our Edge computing, LitePOS, or Mobile POS solutions, we’ve built a system that offers the best of both worlds—speed of innovation and reliability in the face of disruptions. With Hii Retail, retailers can rest easy, knowing that they have a future-proof system that meets the demands of modern commerce while keeping them prepared for any challenge.