Software Image Corruption
Unfortunately, it is not possible to foresee and plan for all problems that arise in the field. The retail store environment is very different than a controlled environment with a high degree of planning and fault tolerant systems. Too many unplanned and unforeseeable events occur in the field.

This is especially true in the case of hardware failures, power spikes and surges, lack of maintenance, software application conflicts, database corruptions and user related errors. Problems may also occur when remotely deploying fix packs, patches, service packs, updates and upgrades. Even with a thorough amount of vendor, beta and customer testing, there is always the risk of corruption when a software update or upgrade is deployed into a remote environment.

Exposure to the Business
In such cases, the result is a corrupted software image. When an image becomes corrupted, it may result in a permanent degradation of the Windows^® operating system and critical store applications. The condition may not be repairable and could require a reload of a fresh software image on the system.

When support incidents such as this occur, the most common solution is to dispatch an onsite service technician to troubleshoot and solve the problem. Additional costs are incurred averaging $200-$500 per incident, not to mention other associated costs including store downtime, a drop in customer service and in the worst case - loss of revenue (store transactions).

More and more businesses find it unacceptable to wait a day or several days for problem resolution. Recovery of a system is thought of in terms of minutes, rather than hours or even days. The only reliable alternative is to restore the correct software image - immediately!

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