No More Black Friday Fire Drills: How Elkjøp Transformed Retail IT with Cato

Black Friday is retail’s biggest moment—and retail IT’s biggest challenge. Spikes in traffic, strained systems, and the constant fear of outages turn what should be a commercial win into an operational war room. For many retailers, it’s a time of sleepless nights, emergency vendor calls, and systems pushed to their breaking point. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  At Elkjøp, we as an IT team have long grappled with challenges of ensuring Black Friday goes off smoothly, challenges we recently overcame by shifting to a more modern, agile infrastructure.  

Retail IT Challenges Control Elkjøp  

For those who don’t know, Elkjøp is the largest electronics retailer in the Nordics. We have more than 10,000 employees spanning 420+ stores operating across four countries.   

Like many retail organizations, our legacy network left my team stretched thin trying to maintain consistent customer experiences across hundreds of stores—especially during peak shopping periods. A patchwork of legacy MPLS infrastructure and a sea of security appliances left us with an environment that struggled to meet the speeds of modern retail. Even simple network changes took weeks. That pace just doesn’t work in modern retail. 

We selected the Cato SASE Cloud Platform to unify and simplify our infrastructure. Deployment was fast, transitioning more than 420 stores to Cato in a matter of months. Cato’s built-in failover mechanisms and secondary link testing eliminated nearly half of the pre-season readiness checks. Automated traffic rerouting ensured uninterrupted service, and the ability to manage everything centrally meant that emergency trips to stores became unnecessary.  For the first time, Black Friday wasn’t a crisis. No emergency calls. No rushed store visits. No chaos. With Cato, I slept better during peak season. 

Elkjøp Goes from Complexity to Control 

Today, Elkjøp operates with a level of agility and control that was hard to reach with their legacy environment. Where it once took six weeks to implement a simple network change, they can now make updates in seconds. This agility has dramatically improved the IT team’s ability to support the business—not just during peak shopping periods, but every day. 

With a single platform managing both networking and security, the IT team can monitor, manage, and troubleshoot issues across all 420+ stores from one interface. This has significantly reduced operational friction and improved response times, ensuring every store can deliver a seamless customer experience. 

This convergence of capabilities means fewer moving parts, fewer vendors to manage, and fewer points of failure. Most importantly, it’s created space for innovation. Instead of chasing down outages or coordinating multiple third parties, Elkjøp’s IT leaders can focus on optimizing customer-facing systems and supporting new business initiatives. 

Cato showed us that it’s possible to solve a complex problem elegantly, leaving us more time to evaluate other aspects of our IT portfolio. 

👉 Read the Full Story Behind Elkjøp’s Deployment Here