II. Characteristics

Retail store and remote locations maintain the following characteristics:

• Stores are tied into corporate via dial up, DSL, satellite and other forms of high speed communications
• Corporate IT remotely manages and updates the store infrastructure over the WAN, VPN or Internet
• The store server or host may be polled each day for transaction logs, sales records, inventory and time and attendance logs
• The stores are always on
• Corporate IT performs scheduled system maintenance to the hardware and software applications
• Onsite break/fix is outsourced to a managed service provider
• The stores can operate independently of each other
• Critical transaction logs and sales records are retrieved and input into corporate databases daily