WALMART’S IS MANAGEMENT TO SECURE FROM IS THREATS
By
Author’s Name (s)
Institutional Affiliation
Table of Contents
Competitive strategy and business processes 6
How do the information systems support strategy 6
Introduction
Managing a vast and wide range of information is a challenging task to do. Business organizations often find it challenging to manage their essential information of customers, operations, products, partners, shareholders, records of communication, order history, and other crucial documents. This type of information is a tier-one priority for organizations as well as for customer as it involves critical credentials which are associated with bank accounts, transactions history, confidential data, communications, and other imperative information. Therefore, business information system plays a key role in managing all these types of data systems to help ease the business process and simplifies on making decisions effectively and promptly.
This main purpose of this report is to analyze how Walmart manages its Information System (IS) to secure from any serious IS threats from hackers or thieves who intends to steal key information and accessible money. Subsequently, to conclude the finding with significant recommendations to improve the identified issues or gaps found within the study. Understanding the key concepts of IS concerning its importance, management, security, and benefits will help gather valuable knowledge to put them into practice in a real-world business scenario.
Walmart is an American multinational firm operating a chain of hypermarkets, grocery stores, departmental stores, and retail worldwide and is headquartered in Bentonville within the US province (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2016). It serves business operation across the world with overall employee strength of 2.2 million and its growing remarkably since the last few years (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2016). Due to effective business service and satisfying customer rate, they have established a solid and vast customer base and are emerging rapidly ever since its inception in 1962 (Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., 2016). As of April 2020, the company is successfully operating 11, 484 stores worldwide (Stock.walmart.com, 2018). The product line of the company includes grocery items, electronic appliances, daily household products, bakery, garments, cooking utensils, pharmaceutical products and so on under a single roof catering to a wide range of customers (Walmart.com, 2020). With such amount of business services, requirements, and customers, Walmart has an effective Big Data Analytics IS which helps them to manage all the important and critical data systems to make tactical decisions in preventing any IS security threat. However, it is important to seek any loopholes that would most probably hamper the business processes and damage customer’s property negatively. Thus, this report will focus on identifying the loopholes within the existing IS of Walmart and provide efficient recommendations to improve and avoid any possible IS threats.
Business Strategy
Five forces analysis
Porter’s five force analysis model includes five fundamental forces which include, the threat of new entrants, bargaining power of suppliers, bargaining power of buyers, the threat of substitute products, services, and rivalry amongst exiting companies (Moreno-Izquierdo et al., 2016). Now concerning the case of Walmart, analysis of five forces model will be relevant to find out the competitive environment of the company effectively and help in improving potentiality to sustain within the cut-throat competitive market (Moreno-Izquierdo et al., 2016). First, there is a massive threat of new entrants such as Kmart, Costco, and Target Corporation which may negatively impact its growth and profitability ratio. Second, Walmart is into cut-throat competition with Amazon, Kohl, Dollar Tree Inc., Costco, Macy’s Inc, and Sears Holdings which indicates rivalry within the existing industry (Arshed & Pancholi, 2016). Third, the threat of substitute products is considerably less as Walmart is having a wide range of products and services in abundance and under a single roof which appears to be easy and convenient towards the customers. Besides, the company has adopted an online or e-commerce strategy to fetch new customers through online mode which is an effective way to progress business. Fourth, due to the large size and abundant range of products, the company offers products at a comparatively low price which acts as a competitive advantage for the business.
Competitive strategy and business processes
The most significant competitive strategy that Walmart adopts is closely related to Porter’s five forces model. According to Porter’s five forces model, cost leadership is a prominent strategy that ensures a competitive advantage for a specific organization (Arshed & Pancholi, 2016). Similarly, the generic competitive strategy of Walmart is cost leadership which plays a significant role in creating a demanding position within the highly competitive market operating with similar product lines (Arshed & Pancholi, 2016). Achieving products and services at a low cost from its suppliers by purchasing them in bulk is what makes a difference within the pricing of consignments that needs to be supplied to Walmart. The effective long-term and beneficial relationship among the retailer and suppliers ensures organizational effectiveness and prosper growth rapidly. The company primarily focuses on a business strategy by dealing out everyday low prices within their e-commerce websites, advertisements in social media and email marketing to attract new customers by luring them with low process and discounts as compared to other players in the market.
How do the information systems support strategy
Walmart is considerably relying on Big Data Analytics to store its every crucial information from its global presence stores related to their business processes, customer data, and sellers transactional history to ensure errorless operations throughout its every store worldwide (Walmart Staff, 2017). This act as a central processing unit for its every business units to make sure all the entities are performing accordingly and systematically (Grover et al., 2018). The main idea of implementing such an information system is to obtain a hint to know what customers expect and how their expectations can be met strategically and successfully (Wamba et al., 2017). They do not use any specific CRM; however, they use Multi-channel and Omni-channel business processes to create customer engagement to initiate sales and revenue generation (Walmart Staff, 2017). These strategies ensure that all the gathered data are customer-centric and helps in making tactical decisions to emerge business by involving competitive advantage effectively.
Analysis
Big Data Analytics
Big Data Analytics plays a crucial part in collecting data from a wide range of sources and is a significant methodology to use in analyzing big sets of unstructured and structured information (Kumar, 2018). A research study by Kumar, (2018), reveals that using Big Data Analytics as an information system for the organization will help improve productivity, effective information flow, and ensure smooth flow of business operations across every connected business units (Kumar, 2018). Big Data Analytics is the process of accumulating, managing, and assessing large sets of information or big data to explore patterns and other useful information to make strategic decisions to improve business processes (Choi et al., 2018).
Walmart uses Big Data Analytics as its information system to capture vital data of customers, suppliers, unit reports, important documents, customer preferences, order history, transactions, likes, dislikes, etc. It significantly helps them to take tactical decisions to improve their business processes as well as to stay one step ahead from its competitors (Walmart Staff, 2017). Besides that, Big Data also provides key assistance to their customers in storing their credentials, preferences, quick checkouts, and personalization of items (Walmart Staff, 2017).
According to Walmart Staff, (2017), which can be found within their official website indicates five ways Walmart utilizes Big Data Analytics has helped them effective employee scheduling, easy checkouts for customers via online stores, managing supply chain, optimizing product preferences by customers, and personalizing shopping experience (Walmart Staff, 2017). Hence, it has been understood that Walmart uses a single Management Information System which is Big Data Analytics instead of CRM or any other information system to collect essential and required data.
Tools and techniques
There are several tools used in Big Data Analytics such as:
- Apache Hadoop: It is a software framework used for group file system and managing big sets of data. Primarily, it is written in Java and an open-source framework to be used by all (Jayagopal & Basser K. K., 2019).
- Lumify: This software is used to analyze big data synthesis, visual graphs which are in 2D and 3D layouts (Grover & Kar, 2017).
- Cassandra: It is a database management system and is free of cost to manage a huge volume of data which are spread across en numbers of commodity servers (Jayagopal & Basser K. K., 2019). It is used by giant companies like Facebook, Accenture, Yahoo, etc.
These tools are used to critically analyze the big data in order to make effectual decisions that will help the business to prosper growth and success simultaneously.
Problems
Apart from the benefits and usage of Big Data Analytics within an organization, certain problems hamper its effectiveness and may lead to rapid decline. Concerning Big Data, hackers could easily get access to stored information and damage or tweak large sets of data with relatively small adjustments in order to gain benefits from it. Similarly, Walmart has a massive probability of data loss and security threat from hackers towards their stored big sets of organizational and customer data. There are various types of security loss exist such as illegal data disclosure, inaccurate data amendment, rejection of services, out of order service, and infrastructure loss. Moreover, hackers mostly seek stealing customer’s and organization’s bank login credentials to get access and transfer the entire accumulated fund from respective bank accounts. Several incidents happened in the past, for instance, in 2019, a software engineer held responsible for a data breach at a renowned bank Capital One in Seattle, the USA who had hacked into a server that held big sets of customer data for the bank which includes more than 100 million customers worldwide (Flitter & Weise, 2019). It has been recorded as the largest data breach from a bank (Flitter & Weise, 2019). This indicates that how vulnerable big data analytics can be towards hackers who are constantly seeking to hack servers in order to steal confidential data to gain monetary benefits enormously and illegally.
Recommendation
By looking at the usage of Big Data Analytics in Walmart as their information system it has been understood that it helps stores big sets of data; however, there are certain loopholes which leads to security threats of important data. Concerning such fact, recommending a few alternatives solutions would help Walmart prevent any breaching of data and managing every crucial data safely.
- Register login credentials: The organization needs to log every login data safely and precisely as it will help to held responsible. Using the help of Microsoft Spreadsheets with a record of all login credentials of the customer, shareholders, employers, and suppliers on a daily basis and monitoring constantly to spot on every activity. This will be done by a positioned employee who will be responsible for registering the activities accurately. Hence, it will help improve the overall productivity of the organization in terms of safeguarding sensitive data and adding extra layer of security.
- Data encryption: Protecting sensitive information of customers and shareholders is a crucial factor for an organization. It is a security approach where crucial data is encoded and can only be decoded or decrypted by the right encryption key saved by the user (Aljawarneh et al., 2017). By storing every critical data in the encrypted form will ensure every communication between the company and the customer will be encrypted by using one or more keys to ensure no data breach by hackers (Aljawarneh et al., 2017). Thus, it assists in adding capabilities to the company to store more big data and secure them effectively.
- Creating data backup: Another alternative solution for preventing a data breach is by creating data backup copies of sensitive database contents within the cloud server of the company that would help store data in a remote location (Kumar et al., 2018). Cloud backup is an effective way to backup copies of important data in an encrypted server to recover files or data whenever they required accessing (Kumar et al., 2018).Therefore, it will assist in ensuring all data are safe and can be recovered to correct any identified problem.
- Firewalls: Ensuring that all the computers interconnected to effective firewalls will help prevent any unauthorized network access to organizational data as well as customer’s information trough hacking (Lamba et al., 2016). It a computing device that precludes any type of illegal network access to an organization server to grab all sensitive data to breach and steal money from the bank account (Lamba et al., 2016). Thereby, it shall help improve the quality of business processes to ensure no illicit access to any type of customers and shareholders’ data.
Conclusion
Managing big sets of data comprising of vital and sensitive information within them required an effective approach to ensure protection from hackers and data breaching. The data breach is a rising attempt of hackers to access customers data and steal their money from respective bank accounts or may cause serious financial damage to the organization as well. Walmart being the industry leader in retail business need to adopt several recommendations which are provided to help improve their information management and security system from threats. It is important to manage crucial data accurately but it is also significant to safeguard such information efficiently so that no hackers can access or steal. Big Data Analytics plays an important role in collecting big data to make strategic decisions to improve business process and experience to end-users. However, there are certain identified issues or loopholes that create a path for hackers to access insightful data to involve in a data breach and stealing of money.
By looking at various examples, it has been known that information system management and tackling security threats are the key factors which are essential to ensure organizational effectiveness and prospering growth simultaneously. Thus, by implementing such practices and strategies within its information system, Walmart will gain significant benefit in improving the management and security of information system from cyber threats and data breach effectively. It is expected that in the future data breach will become more frequent affecting millions of sensitive data at stake. This indicates that there is an immense need for preparedness of protecting data tactically by implementing advancements within the existing information system to make it more effective.
Summary
This particular research report has helped me massively in understanding and gaining in-depth knowledge of Management Information System. Moreover, it has shed light on the importance of information system management and security threats which impacts businesses drastically. By opting Walmart as the company to research, it has given an array of opportunities to learn, observe, and experience how it feels like inside a real-life retail company and how to manage large data sets of the company. The operations and information technology manager of Walmart has given us significant insights about how they use the information system to meet their business needs and what it can result by practising such approach continuously. By interviewing the managers and staffs of Walmart has given a perspective of cybersecurity professionals as well as information technology manager on how to lead an organization with big sets of collected data.
References
Aljawarneh, S., Yassein, M., & Talafha, W. (2017). A multithreaded programming approach for multimedia big data: encryption system. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 77(9), 10997-11016. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-017-4873-9
Arshed, N., & Pancholi, J. (2016). Porter’s Five Forces and Generic Strategies. In N. Arshed, J. McFarlane, & R. M. (Eds.), Enterprise and its Business Environment (pp. 151-168). Goodfellow Publishers.
Choi, T., Wallace, S., & Wang, Y. (2018). Big Data Analytics in Operations Management. Production And Operations Management, 27(10), 1868-1883. https://doi.org/10.1111/poms.12838
Grover, P., & Kar, A. (2017). Big Data Analytics: A Review of Theoretical Contributions and Tools Used in Literature. Global Journal of Flexible Systems Management, 18(3), 203-229. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40171-017-0159-3
Jayagopal, V., & Basser K. K. (2019). Data Management and Big Data Analytics. Optimizing Big Data Management And Industrial Systems With Intelligent Techniques, 1-23. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-5225-5137-9.ch001
Kumar, P., Raj, P., & Jelciana, P. (2018). Exploring Data Security Issues and Solutions in Cloud Computing. Procedia Computer Science, 125, 691-697. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.procs.2017.12.089
Lamba, A., Singh, S., Dutta, N., & Muni, S. (2016). Identifying & Mitigating Cyber Security Threats in Vehicular Technologies. Retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3492680
Moreno-Izquierdo, L., Ramón-Rodríguez, A., & Perles-Ribes, J. (2016). Pricing Strategies of the European Low-Cost Carriers Explained Using Porter’s Five Forces Model. Tourism Economics, 22(2), 293-310. https://doi.org/10.5367/te.2016.0551
Stock.walmart.com. (2018). Walmart Investor Relations – Investors – Financial Information – Unit Counts & Square Footage. Stock.walmart.com. Retrieved from https://stock.walmart.com/investors/financial-information/unit-counts-and-square-footage/default.aspx.
Walmart Staff. (2017). 5 Ways Walmart Uses Big Data to Help Customers. Walmart.com. Retrieved from https://corporate.walmart.com/newsroom/innovation/20170807/5-ways-walmart-uses-big-data-to-help-customers.
Wal-Mart Stores, Inc. (2016). Only Walmart: 2016 Annual Report. Walmart.com. Retrieved from http://s2.q4cdn.com/056532643/files/doc_financials/2016/annual/2016-Annual-Report-PDF.pdf.
Walmart.com. (2020). Walmart: Our History. Walmart.com. Retrieved from https://corporate.walmart.com/our-story/our-history.
Wamba, S., Gunasekaran, A., Akter, S., Ren, S., Dubey, R., & Childe, S. (2017). Big data analytics and firm performance: Effects of dynamic capabilities. Journal of Business Research, 70, 356-365. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbusres.2016.08.009
Get solved or fresh solution on MANAGEMENT TO SECURE FROM IS THREATS and many more. 24X7 help, plag free solution. Order online now!
