Cyber Security Analysis of E-commerce

The report discusses the risk analysis in e-commerce websites and emphasizes the requirement of cyber security by such websites. The organization selected for the report is Amazon, and various studies from their official website and Hoover’s report have been used to carry out the report. The report also provides insights on Amazon's operations and cyber security requirements.

Running head: CYBER SECURITY ANALYSIS OF E-COMMERCE
RISK ANALYSIS IN ECOMMERCE
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1CYBER SECURITY ANALYSIS OF E-COMMERCE
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
The below described work suggests the detailed study on risk analysis in e-commerce websites
and how they handle the operations and other strategic concepts. The organization selected in the
below report is Amazon and various studies from their official website and Hoover’s report has
been used to carry out the report. The report also emphasises on the requirement of cyber
security by such e-commerce websites.

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Table of Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................3
Discussion........................................................................................................................................3
Business Profile...........................................................................................................................3
E-commerce operations...............................................................................................................5
Requirements for Cyber security.................................................................................................6
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................7
References........................................................................................................................................8

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Introduction
The e-commerce platform in the recent days gave grown to a huge extent with the
availability of internet in a worldwide basis and this has resulted in the emergence of many risk
factors in e-commerce field. E-commerce provides access to different products and services to its
users over the internet and this has benefited the service and production industry up to a great
extent. In the below discussed report, the global company Amazon is being reviewed and the
risks faced and managed by the company is being discussed (Laudon & Traver, 2016). Amazon
previously known as Cadabra was established in the year 1994 in Washington, United States of
America by Jeff Bezos. Amazon today is considered to be the largest e-commerce marketplace in
a global platform. It is also the largest company in terms of revenue collection in the world and
also provides one the best cloud based service and AI assistance.
Discussion
Business Profile
Jeff Bezos established the company Amazon in the year 1994 in Washington, United
States of America which focuses on services like cloud based server, e-commerce and very
recently artificial intelligence also. Amazon is one of the best organization according to revenue
in terms of an Internet Company and also in the United States it is the second largest employer.
The company was initially established as an online book store but later on expanded to sell
electronic gadgets, softwares, apparel, furniture, video games and toys. Amazon also started its
cloud based service known as the Amazon Web Services (AWS) in 2002 which later provided
online data storage and elastic compute cloud. The headquarters of Amazon are located in
Seattle, Washington and Virginia, United States and the most important people in the company

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are considered to be Jeff Bezos who is the Chairman, president and CEO of the company and
Werner Vogels is the CTO. Some of the major products that are developed and sold by amazon
are Amazon fire, Echo by Amazon, Amazon Kindle and Amazon Fire TV (Ritala, Golnam &
Wegmann, 2014). The domain of amazon.com attracts over 615 million visitors annually to their
websites which has made the company invest heavily in server capacity. Amazon has the ticker
symbol AMZN and a sales growth of almost 30.93 %. Amazon also registered some record
number of turnover in the recent years which resulted in establishing it as one of the top revenue
generating IT Company in the world. The services of Amazon are spread throughout the globe in
continents of Asia, North and South America as well as Europe. In the recent years, Amazon has
developed the cloud based platform to a great extent which has resulted in huge turnovers for the
company. The below graph shows the profit of Amazon from the year 2008 to the financial year
of 2018.
E-commerce operations
The operations in any organization plays a very important role in the performance and
maintenance of the company and also helps in increasing efficiency of the employees.

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Operations include all the activities and steps performed by organizations and its employees. A
successful e-commerce organization like Amazon needs a strong and robust operations strategy
for its effective performance. The key strategies included in the operations strategy should
include order logistics and fulfillment, inventory management and domestic and global shipping
(Schniederjans, Cao & Triche, 2013). The operations strategy should also be precise and well
researched so that the orders will get fulfilled on time, which will keep the customers happy and
as a result the company will earn revenue. Amazon being one of the leading companies in term
of operation management, has a very robust and well defined operations structure. Amazon
maintains some strategic decisions in their operations management so as to maintain and control
all of its operations.
The design of services and goods under organizational output is maintained by
technology of amazon. Amazon’s e-commerce operations are made efficient by such
technologies and operations. Quality management also plays an important role in the operations
department (Mohapatra, 2013). Amazon has certain aspects regarding the quality management to
improve their e-commerce business. Amazon encourages its employees to enhance new ideas to
solve problems in order to improve their operational structure in business improving. Location
strategy and capacity design is also an important aspect of operations management. Amazon uses
a variety of automations in order to enhance their performance and productivity (Trautman,
2015). This process includes the automation of the ordering process and locations for the
accessibility of resources and also the markets for business. Amazon gives importance in case of
selecting their warehouse or fulfillment center for better communication with their online
customers. The layout strategy, human resources, scheduling and maintenance helps in the
overall operations plan in Amazon or any such e-commerce organization (Chaffey, Hemphill &

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Edmundson-Bird, 2015). The Hoover’s report also signifies and suggests the above mentioned
structure of Amazon as an e-commerce website.
Requirements for Cyber security in E-commerce
Cyber security has become a global concern with the increase in the use of internet based
services in a worldwide basis. Cyber security is also needed in case of e-commerce website in
order to maintain their services and the database and important credentials of their customers. A
company like Amazon takes billions of credentials like birth dates, driver’s license number,
addresses and the most important credit card numbers on a daily basis which indicates that a
huge number of customers are exposed in their cloud based databases (Chou, 2013). Trust is the
most important aspect in such cases, and here Amazon uses SSL certificates to advise their
customers that their transactions are encrypted and secured (Von Solms & Van Niekerk, 2013).
The website security is also a concern in case of Amazon to prevent any external breaches which
might affect their services and business. The back office also provides adequate amount of
support to the company about the back end security and technical support. The installation and
configuration of cyber security systems in Amazon are also looked after by their back office
support which enhances their performance by smoothly delivering their service to the customers
(Fredendall & Hill, 2016). Thus the above mentioned business process are required for the
smooth performance of the Amazon website and services.
Identified Risks and impacts on operation
The potential risks in terms of operations in a company like Amazon are basically the
privacy issues and customer related disputes that occur while various customer service
operations. One of the most modern operation risk that is associated with the multi-national
companies such as Amazon is the credit card fault of the customers which has caused a

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significant amount of loss for the customers as well as the company (United States Securities and
Exchange Commission., 2017). The risks factor decreases the faith in the security of the
company and the customer suffers certain losses which results in the failure of certain sales and
marketing strategies of the organization. This effects the ability to retain and expand the network
of the organization and thus effects the organization. Due to such potential risks in the
organization, the impacts on the whole operation structure of the organization suffers severe
damage and loss. The sources of such risks and attacks are mainly internet sources and also by
external intrusions by various unauthorized personal and these operations generally effect the
credit cards and other payment gateways. These risks occurs in many cases and due to certain
loopholes in the operations structure of the organization such attacks are becoming common and
affecting and impacting the entire operations structure of the organization.
Conclusion
The risks that are associated with the risk management analysis of the e-commerce
industry are discussed in the above report and thus it can be concluded from the report that
proper operation management are needed in the e-commerce industries and proper cyber security
infrastructure is also to be implemented. The e-commerce organization Amazon has certain
operational and cyber security models which are implemented but there are certain flaws in them
too which sometimes result in problem in their business.

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References
Chaffey, D., Hemphill, T., & Edmundson-Bird, D. (2015). Digital business and e-commerce
management. Pearson UK.
Chiu, C. M., Wang, E. T., Fang, Y. H., & Huang, H. Y. (2014). Understanding customers' repeat
purchase intentions in B2C e‐commerce: the roles of utilitarian value, hedonic value and
perceived risk. Information Systems Journal, 24(1), 85-114.
Chou, T. S. (2013). Security threats on cloud computing vulnerabilities. International Journal of
Computer Science & Information Technology, 5(3), 79.
Fredendall, L. D., & Hill, E. (2016). Basics of supply chain management. CRC Press.
Laudon, K. C., & Traver, C. G. (2016). E-commerce: business, technology, society.
Mohapatra, S. (2013). E-commerce Strategy. In E-Commerce Strategy (pp. 155-171). Springer,
Boston, MA.
Ritala, P., Golnam, A., & Wegmann, A. (2014). Coopetition-based business models: The case of
Amazon. com. Industrial Marketing Management, 43(2), 236-249.
Schniederjans, M. J., Cao, Q., & Triche, J. H. (2013). E-commerce operations management.
World Scientific Publishing Company.
Trautman, L. J. (2015). E-Commerce, cyber, and electronic payment system risks: lessons from
PayPal. UC Davis Bus. LJ, 16, 261.

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United States Securities and Exchange Commission. (2017). [online]. Accessed from
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1018724/000101872418000005/amzn-
20171231x10k.htm#sB54CE3191BBF5248A9ABB2E9CDB52D56 [Accessed on 12 Aug
2019].
Von Solms, R., & Van Niekerk, J. (2013). From information security to cyber security.
computers & security, 38, 97-102.