The Supply Side: Walmart’s security center keeps tabs on global threats

In addition to a focus on its broad retail operation, Walmart keeps tabs on threats with its Global Security Operations Center (GSOC) to its assets worldwide, which include facilities, personnel, its large trucking fleet and customers. It also monitors cyber threats.

The center is in the basement of a building on Walmart’s new corporate campus. Jason Jackson, vice president of the GSOC, said the new facility is much larger with expanded capabilities. Walmart said GSOC is five times larger than the former emergency operations center.

“This center is very different, and it’s a huge step forward from where we’ve been,” Jackson said. “Using the learnings over the past couple of decades, the center gives Walmart a new platform to better handle crises and emergencies globally.”

He said the expanded size and capabilities allow the GSOC to monitor the entire world, which is exciting because it’s a step ahead of what the older, smaller center could not do. The older center was fine for watching hurricane and weather-related events. Walmart employs meteorologist Tom Beddard, who watches the weather where Walmart operates.

Jackson said Walmart has long been able to leverage its scale and flexibility as a company. More than 30 people across multiple business functions make up the GSOC group, which works together and plans how to react when a crisis happens. Response assets include trucks stocked with food, water, emergency provisions, flashlights, batteries and a mobile pharmacy that can operate in case the store pharmacy is closed. Walmart coordinates with state and federal agencies where hurricanes and other natural disasters occur.

But GSOC is more than that. Jackson said the new center is focused on a global line of sight. On June 5, the day Walmart allowed the media to tour the facility, the GSOC was watching a wildfire in Canada on an electronic world map that covered one entire wall of the center.

“We’ve been reporting on this for several days, supporting our field operators that are taking care of this one store, a little bit of an isolated store in Manitoba, and a little bit further up north, about 90 associates there that we’ve been tracking,” Jackson said. “Unfortunately, wildfires really can have a devastating effect. Now we are paying attention to our global operations, not just the U.S. operation.”

He said one mission of the center is to bring all of the partners together from various areas of the company to have a single source of truth.

“I’m sure you all know how hard that is, to get to a single source of truth, where everyone’s contributing to the best information and then pulling from the best information, so that we can be efficient, effective, fast, agile,” Jackson said.

He said when Walmart changes directions, it can do so quickly when acting on a single source of truth. For instance, GSOC can look inside any store or distribution center facility it operates with camera access. Jackson said while one team may be monitoring social media for threats and the spread of false information. GSOC can access store cameras to see if the threat is real or if it’s a hoax, or perhaps something is happening in the parking lot or adjacent property.

There is a press team to provide information to the media to dispel misinformation and prevent its further spread, according to Jackson. He said the new center also allows Walmart to be more proactive, which is an advantage in mitigating risks and impact.

“Again, we’ve been good in the past about seeing things coming,” Jackson said. “We’ve got a meteorology team and other teams that help us pay attention to what’s happening in our environment. But the focus is even greater today on how we’re being proactive, how we’re trying to find issues at their earliest source, at the earliest point of detection, and whether we can be proactive and take action then to prevent or to mitigate, or it’s to make sure that we are responding as early as possible.”

He said being proactive is key in spotting risk. On one side of the center, there is a team — the intake team — scanning the global environment. It could be a protest in Bangladesh, an earthquake in Peru, or a bomb explosion at an international airport, Jackson said. He said intake team monitoring also includes a truck driver in an accident, or an issue with a corporate employee traveling internationally.

“A lot of our domain is physical risk, but there is also cyber, security, epidemiological issues and crime-type events that we are looking at in real time,” Jackson said. “Our team is constantly in motion 24/7, 365 days a year, because our environment constantly changes and shifts. A lot of what you see up here on this huge screen, sometimes macro level stuff, things constantly change on the screens.”

A wall-sized electronic map at the front of the center represented the U.S.-based supply chain fleet with all the trucks en route to their destinations. The map is updated every 15 seconds. The distribution centers and large facilities were represented by large dots, and the little dots represented Walmart’s private fleet of trucks in motion.

“Part of us being successful is understanding the operational status of our business in real time, and being that nerve center, or having the pulse on what’s happening operationally within the company, so that when we overlay crisis, we can re-route and redirect very quickly all of the activity and go through the other nodes that we have within the company to achieve that,” explained Jackson.

The new center has a large area for Walmart and its strategic partners to plan and work together to coordinate response efforts no matter how large. Jackson said everyone from the Walmart Foundation to Sam’s Club, operations, supply chain and health and wellness have room to meet in the new center to coordinate response plans.

“This is a muscle we’ve had for over two decades, and we’ve been constantly refining it,” Jackson said. “And it allows us to do some of the things that we do, and even globally, as we share this, when we think about things like Hurricane Otis, that occurred down in Acapulco, an earthquake in Mexico City and one in China.”

Editor’s note: The Supply Side section of Talk Business & Politics focuses on the companies, organizations, issues and individuals engaged in providing products and services to retailers. The Supply Side is managed by Talk Business & Politics, and is sponsored by HRG.