Sonepar is a €32.5 billion B2B electrical products distributor operating 90 brands across 40 countries with 46,000 associates. Founded in 1969 as a family-owned business, the company is now executing what it calls an "ambitious transformation" to build the first fully digitalized omnichannel platform in global electrical distribution - a shift that surfaces meaningful attack surface across legacy wholesale infrastructure, customer-facing e-commerce, and internal operational technology.
The threat model here is decentralized by design. Ninety distinct brands means ninety potential entry points, each with its own customer portals, inventory systems, and on-premise distribution nodes spanning Europe, the Americas, and Asia-Pacific. The company's tech stack includes Azure cloud infrastructure, Windows Server and Red Hat Enterprise Linux environments, Epicor Eclipse ERP, Power BI analytics, and various CRM systems - a hybrid architecture common in industrial distribution but challenging to secure at scale. Customer touchpoints run over the counter, on-site, by phone, and online, which means securing both digital channels and the physical/logistical systems that fulfill orders.
Security teams here likely contend with supply chain integrity issues endemic to wholesale distribution, third-party risk across a sprawling vendor ecosystem, and the operational constraints of keeping legacy systems running while migrating to cloud-native services. The digitalization push introduces modern application security concerns - API security, identity and access management across decentralized operations, and data protection for commercial customer relationships - while maintaining continuity in mission-critical distribution workflows that can't afford downtime.
