Impact of E-Commerce on Network Security

The assignment content discusses the networking of computers to access the internet using IPv6, domain names, and platform architecture. The company is utilizing a high-speed download speed of 43 terabits per second. Additionally, it touches on the impact of e-commerce, including its benefits and drawbacks. Furthermore, it highlights the importance of security measures such as TLS, HTTPS, strong passwords, and alternative authentication methods to prevent hacking and other cyber threats.

Iceland foods ltd
Prima tech Promotional Materials

1
Introduction
The Iceland foods ltd is a supermarket chain of British which emphasize on the sale of frozen
foods. The company lies in the retail industry. The company provides frozen foods such as meats
and vegetables, and groceries. The share of the company in the UK food market is 1.8%. The
company started its business in 1969, and the first store is opened in Leg Street, Shropshire,
Oswestry, England with the investing partner Peter Hinchcliffe who has invested £59 for the rent
of one month (Iceland et al., 2016). Initially, the island was specialized in the slack frozen food.
In the year 1977, the new store was opened in Manchester, and they were selling their own
packaged and labelled food. In the year 1984, the business became public. During the year 1993,
the business acquired the chain of French Au Gel and also took over the department store of
Littlewoods but the move was not successful, and it resulted in hug losses to the business. The
holding of the business was named as the Big Food Group in the year 2002, and they attempted
to focus on the comfort sector through a Londis bid. Moreover, in the year 2000, the business
merged with the Booker plc.to expand their business.
Brick operation
The company has the physical presence in the United Kingdom. The company provides company
provides its services to more than eight hundred stores. The company provides various food
frozen items at the stores. The company operates its brick operations in all the stores in the
United Kingdom. In the year 1978, the business managed to have 27 stores under their name.
Further, in the year 1983, the business expanded after purchasing 17 stores of the St. Catherine’s
freezer centre which was based in Bristol. In the year 1996, the business opened another seven
stores in Letterkenny and Dublin. Unfortunately, they were closed in 2005 because of the

2
financial crisis. The business is also linked with the British home stores in order to expand the
business. Again in the year 2008, the company got access to the Irish market and agreed to a deal
with franchise through Irish cash. In 2009, the other stores were opened in Dublin, on the road of
Navan, and the Illaccentre. At present, the business has ten stores in Ireland.
The new store of the Iceland foods ltd was inaugurated in the town centre of Dubley in
December as the part of the department store of Beatties. Iceland foods ltd also have stores in
Portugal and Spain in convergence through the retailer overseas of Spain. The stores keep the
stock of the products of Iceland the Waitrose’s. Moreover, in the year 2012, the company
inaugurated a new store in Iceland and at this point in time, the company has three stores in
Iceland which offer services 24/7. In the year 2013, Iceland foods ltd developed seven more
stores that were initially franchised. In 2014, Iceland foods ltd used the concept of stores i.e. The
Food Warehouse and the size of the warehouse was double the size of normal Island store and
the full range of chilled and frozen products, extended variety of special and luxury products of
frozen food, production of fresh and chilled meat and also a great selection of grocery product
packs in bulk. In the year 2015, The Food Warehouse was running successfully in the seven
locations of the UK.
Click operation
The company also provides its frozen food and groceries food through online mode which
enables to provide its products within the United Kingdom. The company has website and
mobile phone app in order to provide service through click button service as well. It helps to
provide the services to the wide range of customers who are not able to come at the stores. The
online services of the company are operated through website and apps. The business announced
that they have already begun the online shopping service trial and it was estimated in 2005 that

3
the company would expand and new 280 stores will be launched which would cover around 50
percent of the population of the UK. Further, the company completed its roll-out on the shopping
services online and around 84 percent of the population of the UK were using it. The company
offered free delivery on the order which is above £35 and the services which are being provided
online helped in the deriving growth of delivered sales of the business to a great level. In the year
2015, the player of Iceland Bingo won £3.4 million from a stake of 15p and became the second
largest online Bingo of the UK. The company is ranked on the third position of the nation in
order to provide great online services to the customers and make them satisfied completely. Due
to online services, the sales increased to £2.7 billion and the maintenance and generation of the
cash was going strong. Further, 28 stores were opened along with the six warehouse stores of the
Food.
Further, the online shopping raised to £1.3 million for charity with the charitable foundation of
Iceland foods. In response to the great growth of the online service business. The company
inaugurated the new store i.e. dark store which was dedicated to the picking of order online on
the Tipton industrial estate. The online picking of the orders apart from the region’s retail stores
permitted the company to provide more broad range and the improvised services to the
customers online. The company also offers free slots of delivery in the stores to enable them to
ground on expanding the traditional operations of the business offering home delivery of the
products which are purchased in the stores. Therefore, the company was able to grow their
operations and business by offering online services to the customers.
Balancing of click operation over brick operation
The company is providing both bricks and click services to the customers in order to give high
quality of services to the customers. The company is balancing operations of both brick and click

4
which is necessary in order to operate in an effective manner. The company is providing similar
frozen food and groceries through brick and click operations. The operations of virtual and
physical presence are very necessary in order to promote the brand in the eyes of the customers.
The increase in the trend of online service adds competitive advantage by providing the product
and services through mobile apps and websites which offer the similar experience as they receive
in the stores (Baudino et al., 2015). But the trend of online services could be the ongoing
disruption for the traditional offline services of the company. So the company is balancing both
the operations in order to provide convenience to its customers.
Further, the advantage of creating high functions over the new brands online helps in fulfilling
capabilities. The supermarket was also doing well when they did not enter into online services.
And offering the online services only helped the company to expand their business in various
parts of the country. It is generally said that the balance between the click and brick operation is
very challenging for most of the businesses. Iceland foods ltd as proved it wrong and had shown
that the balancing is not difficult as they are providing products and services of the great quality.
The company used various approaches in order to maintain the balance between the two
operations and finally ended up with the un-bundle burdensome transactions solution in order to
maintain the balance. From this approach, it has been observed that the company is able to
achieve sustainable competitive advantage then before and it also helped the company in
maximizing the profitability, and it also helped in improving the business value and image.
Despite the auxiliary and the restricted role of the e-commerce for the firms, the operations of the
company are being supported in the various innovative and creative ways and helps in fulfilling
the needs of the customer. Therefore, there are various situations when the company wants to
reduce the online sales to some extent because they have to be more conscious while providing

5
the products and services online as compared to the offline because of the quality only. But the e-
commerce helps in maximizing the value chain of pre and post sales activities and operations
which further helps in maximizing the profitability.

6
BROCHURE 1
ICELAND FOODS LTD.
Technologies
The company is using various hardware and software technologies in order to provide excellent
services to its customers. The technologies used by the company include web servers, web
authorizing tools, database systems, server software, and browser. The web server enables to
provide a webpage to the customers who help to provide online services to the customers. The
web server acts as a communicator between the company and client in order to deliver
information on the company and services to the customers (Stern et al., 2015). The company is
using the web browser which is a software application used by the company for traversing,
presenting and retrieving information on the World Wide Web. The database system is used to
record the data in order analyse the data for improving the level of customer satisfaction by
amending the services. The server software is used by the company which provides various
functionalities which include sharing of data, providing online service to the customers and
others. The company is also using web authorization tools for presenting the web pages.

7
BROCHURE 2
ICELAND FOODS LTD.
The company is using various technologies in order to provide networking services to the
company. The technologies include IP address, domain name, multiple registration of domains;
download speed and browser and platform compatibility. The IP address is defined as the
internet protocol adders which is a numeric label given to the particular computer and it is used
in the participating in networking of computer so that the internet can be accessed by the user.
The company is using the latest version which is IPv6 (Giannini et al., 2014). The domain name
is defined as the part of the network address which enables to determine the belonging to the
specific domain. It is formed by the procedure and rules of the DNS (domain name system). The
registration of domain name is generally administered by registrars of the domain name. The
company is using highest download speed which is 43 terabits per second. The speed of
download is defined as the total bandwidth in contrast to data transmission. The platform is
defined as the hardware or software which is used by the company to host an application. The
company is using the operating system which enables to coordinate the program used within the
organization.

8
Impact of e-commerce
The growth of e-commerce is rapidly increasing which impacts on the sales volume of the
company. The positive impacts of e-commerce include global marketplace by enabling the
service across the country. The e-commerce also provides trading facilities 24/7 which provide
convenience to the users. It also helps to promote the brand in the eyes of the customers through
social media, web page, and others which require low start-up for the companies and it increases
the profit margin of the companies. It also helps to collect customer data which can be further
used by the company for analysing the customer taste and preference. It also becomes the
alternate source of income by providing online services to the customers or cost of promotional
activities (Chen et al., 2012). However, the negative impact of e-commerce includes security
issues such as hacking, cyber threat and others. Another negative impact of e-commerce includes
customer trust, lack of human trust, international legislation, and product related queries. The
international laws are different from a legal system based on the state which creates a problem
for the companies in trading globally.

9
NEWSLETTER
RECOMMENDATIONS
The e-commerce provides various tools to promote the brand in the eyes of the customers such as
search engines, newspaper groups and forums as it is a public place online where people meet for
the open discussion and in order to express their views, direct marketing as it helps in selling the
products directly to the customers and doesn’t involve any retailers, effective user interface as it
helps the user to communicate through a program and a command choice is being selected
among the various menus, banner and popup as they help in attracting the web traffic and also
helps in capturing the addresses of the emails further they are the new windows of the web
browser which helps in displaying the advertisements, establishing customer loyalty in a virtual
environment as it helps in developing a brand image and also helps in gaining sustainable
competitive advantage, and others. Being an individual, in my opinion, the direct marketing is
the best option as it includes door to door selling of frozen foods which helps to use the product
by the customers, and it enables to attract the customers by providing a high quality of products
to the customers.

10
POSTER
Analysis of issues
The various threats are faced by the company which includes backdoors, denial of service attack,
direct access attack, eavesdropping, spoofing, tampering and others. The major security issues
are hacking as it will damage the variety of groups and the systems because the hackers hack the
system for their own motives which destroys the company’s brand image completely and as a
result the company faces huge losses, identify theft because if the identity is being stolen then the
company might lose its customers and it can also be used in a negative way like the competitors
might steal the identity for their own benefit and this will impact the company adversely. The
security issues impacts on the brand value and sales volume of the company due to the hacking
of computer system which leaks the confidential information of the company. The leaking of
company's information may eliminate the competitive advantage of the company which impacts
on the brand's image because the strategies of the company can be used by the competitors and it
impacts on the sales volume of the company. The security issues might occur because of the
employees, unauthorized machines, coding mistakes by the employees, applications of the
legacy, servers which are hidden in the files, incorrect sharing of the files, etc.
Analysis of methods
The various methods can be used by the company in order to prevent the security risk. The
methods are explained below:
1. TLS
The transport layered security is defined as the security which is used to prevent the
communication security over a network of computer. It is used to secure the communication

11
between the server and web browsers. It is used in various applications such as email, web
browsing and others.
2. HTTPS
The hypertext transfer protocol is defined as the transport layer security which is used to
provide authentication to visit the website. It helps to provide protection and integrity of the
data which is exchanged. It is mainly a protocol which is used to protect the communication
over a network of the computers. The HTTPS connection is mainly used for the transaction
of payments on various types of websites. It develops the secure channel over the insecure
networks (Pearce et al., 2013).
3. Strong passwords
The strong password helps to prevent the security over the networks. The strong password
has twelve characters which include alphabet, numeric, one special character, and one capital
letter. The combination of all the characters helps to provide strong security over the
networks. The secure password helps to provide security by reducing the risk of hacking,
attacks and others. The use of single character is not a good password because it can be easily
hacked by the hackers.
4. Alternative authentication methods
The methods other than the password can be used by the company in order to provide security
over the networks. The authentication methods include fingerprint, patterns and others. The
fingerprint is the most secure method which is used by the banks in order to provide high
security to the consumers. Other authentication methods include the onetime password, tokens,
digital certificate, smart cards and biometric devices. The pin code helps to protect the data by
providing high security over the internet. The cost of acquisition is also low.

12

13
References
Stern, B. B., &Zinkhan, G. M. (2015). Netvertising Image Communication Model
(NICM). Advertising, Promotion, and New Media, 30.
Giannini, E. (2014). Selling across the spectrum: The multiplatform brand flows of
heroes. Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA Postgraduate Network, 7(1).
(2016). Retrieved 2 December 2016, from https://www.iceland.co.uk/
Baudino, F., & Johnson, C. (2015). Brick & Click Libraries: An Academic Library Conference
(15th, Maryville, Missouri, November 6, 2015). Online Submission.
Chen, H., Chiang, R. H., &Storey, V. C. (2012). Business Intelligence and Analytics: From Big
Data to Big Impact. MIS quarterly, 36(4), 1165-1188.
Pearce, M., Zeadally, S., & Hunt, R. (2013). Virtualization: Issues, security threats, and
solutions. ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR), 45(2), 17.