Assessment of Security Risks at Costco Wholesale
This portfolio project report contains the relevant organizational information of Costco Wholesale Corporation, which is a wholesale giant in the United States. The primary intention of this report is to highlight the basic organizational location and financial information, along with the computing and network infrastructure details to help layout the detailed structure of an Information Technology (IT) risk assessment report. As part of the risk assessment report, the key elements emphasized are the threats and vulnerabilities that are possible in the current system and architecture; based on the vulnerabilities, the risks that are likely to occur; and the suggestions to identify and mitigate …show more content…
Privacy and confidentiality of the users and the security of business information are of utmost importance for the company, which is heavily dependent on inventory management software, monstrous databases, e-commerce applications with financial transactions, and complex network and web architectures spanning across multiple countries. In 2012, Costco understood the importance of technology progression, and as a result, advanced and improved their entire Information System (IS) architecture which also includes moving towards the cloud computing based architecture (Barnes, 2013). Moreover, in the plan published by Costco for their upcoming $3 billion investments for 2016, a big portion of this will be spent on the ecommerce infrastructure development (Kalogeropoulos, 2015). In another crucial IT decision, Costco in 2011, entered into a cloud computing based Electronic Health Record (EHR) business, priced at $599 per doctor per month (Terry, …show more content…
In 2008, with 1200 servers and multiple AS/400 mainframe computers, approximately 95 percent of the computers in the Costco’s data center had Windows operating system, while the overall network consists of 13,000 HP thin clients, and 9,000 end user customers (Microsoft, 2008). The scope of this report is to accentuate the risks involved with these critical IS components of cloud computing and virtualization, Windows operating system, databases; and the e-commerce and network applications, along with the ways to control and mitigate them based on the guidelines provided by Blank and Gallagher,
This portfolio project report contains the relevant organizational information of Costco Wholesale Corporation, which is a wholesale giant in the United States. The primary intention of this report is to highlight the basic organizational location and financial information, along with the computing and network infrastructure details to help layout the detailed structure of an Information Technology (IT) risk assessment report. As part of the risk assessment report, the key elements emphasized are the threats and vulnerabilities that are possible in the current system and architecture; based on the vulnerabilities, the risks that are likely to occur; and the suggestions to identify and mitigate …show more content…
Privacy and confidentiality of the users and the security of business information are of utmost importance for the company, which is heavily dependent on inventory management software, monstrous databases, e-commerce applications with financial transactions, and complex network and web architectures spanning across multiple countries. In 2012, Costco understood the importance of technology progression, and as a result, advanced and improved their entire Information System (IS) architecture which also includes moving towards the cloud computing based architecture (Barnes, 2013). Moreover, in the plan published by Costco for their upcoming $3 billion investments for 2016, a big portion of this will be spent on the ecommerce infrastructure development (Kalogeropoulos, 2015). In another crucial IT decision, Costco in 2011, entered into a cloud computing based Electronic Health Record (EHR) business, priced at $599 per doctor per month (Terry, …show more content…
In 2008, with 1200 servers and multiple AS/400 mainframe computers, approximately 95 percent of the computers in the Costco’s data center had Windows operating system, while the overall network consists of 13,000 HP thin clients, and 9,000 end user customers (Microsoft, 2008). The scope of this report is to accentuate the risks involved with these critical IS components of cloud computing and virtualization, Windows operating system, databases; and the e-commerce and network applications, along with the ways to control and mitigate them based on the guidelines provided by Blank and Gallagher,