Short paper written
Amazon Company
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October 30, 2015
Overview of Amazon Company
Amazon.com is an e-commerce company that merged on May 28, in 1996. The company provides a range of services and products through its websites. The company started as an online bookstore and later diversified to sell video streaming, software, video games, furniture, toys, apparel and jewelry. The products of the company offered through the websites facing consumer comprise content and merchandise that the company purchases for resale from merchants and the ones presented by third-party vendors. The firm offers its products and third-party products in various categories, through its selling websites and its websites of mobile and applications. The company also sells and manufactures devices of electronic comprising Fire tablets, e-readers, fire TVs, and fire phones.
Business Profile
International company of Amazon.om is an American clouding computing and electronic commerce enterprise with headquarters situated in Seattle, Washington. The firm has separate marketing websites for the United Kingdom and Ireland, Canada, Spain, Italy, India, and Mexico. The corporation offers global shipping to certain other companies for its produces. Amazon has numerous competitors in the electronics and merchandise segment most being brick and rivals of mortar including the family dollar, Staples, RadioShack, Sears and big lots (N T. , 2015).
In the media, the company competes with auction site eBay; Apple; Google with its play store and the liberty interactive of media producer. The company provides services to sets of four primary customers: sellers, initiatives, consumers and content inventors. The firm also provides promotional and advertising services such as online marketing and agreements of the co-branded credit card. On 15th may 1997, Amazon offered its public contributing of stock trading beneath the NASDAQ stock exchange with a sign AMZN, which was $625.90, charged at a price of $18 in every share. The cash flow for the year 2012, 2013, and 2014 were; $20,000, $11,000, and $10,000 respectively (Terry, 2014). Their primary source of revenue comes from the sale of products purchased from retail or third party vendors’. They serve the consumers through their personal website, along with streaming video’s online, as well as offering the consumers to read books on through Amazon Kindel. Those who wish to sell products are given the opportunity to sell their products on their website with their own website to be processed through Amazon. By allowing this, Amazon collects fees from the seller to add to their profit gains. Offering independent writers to publish their books through Kindle Direct Publishing. (Amazon.Com, 2015). Amazon.Com, Inc. is located in Seattle, Was and can be found by visiting their own website at http://www.amazon.com. In June 2015, they were ranked #29 by Fortune 500, #33 in FT Global 500 and #29 in Fortune 1000. Their biggest competitors are Wal-Mart, Apple, and Alibaga Group Holding Limited. Their total sales in 2014 reached a value of 89 million in revenue.
In 2014 the reported having over 154 thousand employees, with an employee growth of 31 %, their current assets reported for 2014 were 55 million dollars. The company was originally founded in 1994 and has grown quite considerably since. The main industries that Amazon service are internet &mail-order retail, home furnishings, and book publishers, along with a number of other industries that include electronics and technology. The current CEO for Amazon is Jeffrey P. Bezos, followed by Brian T. Olsavsky as VP and CFO. The company Senior Vice President of Consumer Businesses Jeffrey A. Wilke. Amazon’s revenue for 2014 averaged around $88 million, while their gross profit was $26 million, however their operating income was reported at $178 million, though they took a loss in their net income. According to Hoover’s, their overall credit rating is medium, meaning they have a moderate to low risk of failure. (Hoovers, 2015)
Needs for Cybersecurity
Some job postings include the government security clearance requirement in the title of the job. The company requires top-secret clearance in security position where it dives into security technologies such as systems of new authentication, components on hardware security, system hardening, cryptography and analysis of massive scale audit. With cybersecurity development, the organization can protect their Amazon web service user workloads, identities and bake security into any IT SaaS generated on amazon web services.
The precautions increase visibility and protection against the cyber-attacks, human error, and insider threats. Baking security in from the get-go means that one can focus on the core competencies of an organization, investors, and customers, instill confidence in prospects, and expand the addressable market without any compliance worry in sight (N T. , 2015).
Amazon needs to protect their vendors’ personal information from an intrusion. Customers personal information such as banking, phone numbers, addresses and personal passwords need to be well governed. Most hackers that make attempts to break into such sites as Amazon, E-bay, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE), etc., are attempting to gain financial information of their consumers. When individuals shop online, they want to feel their credit card information is safe from attacks, or safe from being compromised. It is vital to any company that has been given trust by consumers with personal /private information to be well safeguarded from attacks. Statistics show that cyber-crime against businesses within the United States has reached 65 million dollars thus far for 2015 (Statista, 2015)
Cybersecurity Services and Products
Categories of cyber security services and products likely to be purchased by Amazon Company are managed security services that help to defend the company from cyber threats. Such as adequate firewall products and monitoring software such as Wireshark, or installing Nessus with Backtrack 5 tools for penetration testing of the server. Wireshark is one of the top leading tools for networks when needing to do protocol analyzing. Wireshark offers live captures and offline analyzing, It’s captured network data can be browsed via GUI, via the TTY-mode TShark utility. The output from Wireshark can be easily exported to XML, Postscript, CSV, or plain text formats (Wireshark, 2015) .
Nessus Cloud would be the ideal service for Amazon to use on their servers. Nessus Cloud allows for resource sharing, multiple scanning modes, constant coverage, external network vulnerability scanning, web application assessment, and PCI approved scanning vendor (ASV). With the constant changes in the way hackers find ways to access a service, Nessus is constantly updating their product to stay ahead of the hacker. Having a fully trained cyber security team enhances the protection of the company, their clients and their entire infrastructure. (Nessus Cloud, 2015).
With the amount of business Amazon conducts online, it is imperative that they stay ahead of the security threats that present challenges. Their continued growth in the business industry world-wide with individuals making online purchases is a target for a hacker in an effort to obtain a user’s credit card information. The company also needs to purchase the web security category to block the web threats to reduce the infections of malware, decrease the incidents of help desk and free up resources of valuable IT (N A. , 2015).
The firewall as a category of a cyber-security product is likely to be purchased by the company so as to monitor and control the outgoing and incoming network traffic based on rules of predetermined security. The firewall establishes an obstacle between a trusted, secure internal network and another outside network, like the internet, which is anticipated not to be safe. A proper firewall, such as a next-generation firewall (NGFW) might be a better choice for the type of firewall to implement. A NGFW offers hardware or software based system. It is able to protect the server from the most advanced attacks at the application levels, and at the ports and protocol levels. Having a secure firewall is another step in keeping hackers from being able to gain access to sensitive information that should not be easily gained. (Shea, 2014)
Conclusion
Amazon.com, Inc. works as an online vendor in North America and globally. It functions through the North America, Global, and Amazon Web Services (AWS) sections. The company aids consumers through marketing websites, such as amazon.ca, amazon.com, and amazon.com.mx, which mainly comprise merchandise and content obtained for resale from sellers and those presented by third-party sellers. In addition, the corporation serves designers and enterprises through AWS that offers compute, storage, analytics, database, presentations, and arrangement services in start-ups, initiatives, government actions, and academic organizations.
References Amazon.Com, I. (2015). 10-K 1 amzn-20141231x10k.htm FORM 10-K. Washington, DC 20649: United States Securities and Exchange Commission. Hoovers. (2015, October 28). Company Profile Amazon.com. Retrieved from Hoovers: http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.AMAZONCOM_INC.ef53c3d095de033c.html N, A. (2015, June 23). AMAZON.COM, INC. Retrieved November 1, 2015, from hoovers: http://www.hoovers.com/company-information/cs/company-profile.Amazoncom_Inc.ef53c3d095de033c.html N, T. (2015, October 15). amazon. Retrieved November 1, November, from reuters: http://www.reuters.com/finance/stocks/companyProfile?symbol=AMZN.O Nessus Cloud. (2015, October 17). Retrieved from Tenable Network Security: http://www.tenable.com/products/nessus/nessus-cloud Shea, S. (2014, January). Next-generation firewall (NGFW) definition. Retrieved from Search Security: http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/definition/next-generation-firewall-NGFW Statista. (2015, October 28). Financial damage caused by cyber attacks in the U.S. in 2014-2015. Retrieved from Statista : The Statistics Portal: http://www.statista.com/statistics/193444/financial-damage-caused-by-cyber-attacks-in-the-us/ Terry. (2014, December 31). amazon.com. Retrieved November 1, 2015, from yahoo: https://finance.yahoo.com/q/pr?s=AMZN+Profile Wireshark. (2015, October 27). Retrieved from Wireshark: https://www.wireshark.org/