Introduction
Woolworths Group is a renowned retail conglomerate based in Australia that operates specifically in supermarkets and general merchandise. The company was founded in 1924 and is headquartered in Bella Vista, New South Wales. The firm’s largest division is Woolworths Supermarkets, which is the largest supermarket chain in Australia, with over 1,000 stores nationwide. Woolworths Supermarkets sells a range of products, including groceries, fresh produce, and household items. According to Woolworths Group’s 2021 financial results, the company generated a total revenue of AUD 67.9 billion (Parkinson & Parkinson, 2018). This represents an increase of 3.7% compared to the previous year. The majority of Woolworths Group’s revenue is generated from its supermarkets division, followed by its liquor, hospitality, and general merchandise divisions. As of 2021, Woolworths Group employed approximately 215,000 people across all its divisions. Woolworths Group is committed to sustainability and has set ambitious targets to reduce its environmental impact. The company aims to source 100% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2025 and to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. Woolworths Group has also implemented measures to reduce food waste, including donating surplus food to charity and partnering with food rescue organizations (Wang, 2022).
Discussion of Data Flows and Communication Protocol Stacks of the Company
Figure 1: Network Topology DiagramThe three areas of operation that is opted for this case study are hereby mentioned below:Updating product information: First operation that workforce of Woolworths Group ascertains is updating product information in the company’s inventory management system. This involves adding new products, updating pricing information, or adjusting inventory levels. From the perspective of a data and networking specialist, this operation includes ensuring that the updated information is properly synchronized across all relevant systems and data stores. Aside from that the process also verifies that the changes are reflected in the company’s online store, in-store price scanners, and other systems that rely on the inventory data (Trammell-Keller, 2019).The flow of data and the protocols used in updating product information for Woolworths Group would involve the following steps:p;Generating sales reports: Second operation that employees of Woolworths Group undertake is generating sales reports to track performance metrics for a particular store, department, or product category. From the data and networking specialist’s perspective, this operation revolves around accumulating the sales data properly and aggregating it from diverse systems, such as the point-of-sale system and the inventory management system. The flow of data and the protocols used in generating sales reports for Woolworths Group are as follows:Conducting product research: A third operation that employees of Woolworths Group initiates are conducting product research to inform purchasing decisions or marketing campaigns. This ranges from analyzing sales data to researching competitor products. From the viewpoint of a data and networking specialist, this operation involves ensuring that the research data is properly collected, analyzed, and shared with the relevant stakeholders. The process also makes certain that all information is properly documented and communicated to other teams within the company (Vilajosana et al. 2021).The flow of data and the protocols used in conducting product research for Woolworths Group.
Description and Analysis of the Architecture and the Distribution of Data Used by the Company
Woolworths Group uses a distributed architecture and distributed data storage for their IT systems. This allows for increased scalability, flexibility, and redundancy, as well as improved performance and availability. In a distributed architecture, applications and data are spread across multiple servers or nodes, often located in different geographic locations. Aside from that, the issue of load balancing as well as fault tolerance can also be processed by the nearest available server. Woolworths Group use a combination of on-premises and cloud-based infrastructure for their distribution systems. This benefits the firm in measures including the control and security of on-premises infrastructure, and the scalability and cost-effectiveness of cloud infrastructure.In terms of data distribution, Woolworths Group inculcates an array of traditional relational databases along with distributed data stores, such as No SQL databases, key-value stores, and column-family databases. This gives the firm an edge over its rival in relation to the storage of different types of data, including structured and unstructured data, as well as improved performance and scalability (Zeadally, Wasseem & Raicu, 2018).
Comparison of the Communication Protocol Stacks in the Company.
Protocol Stack Functionality Security PortHTTPS Used for web traffic and secure data transmission Utilizes SSL/TLS encryption for security Port 443SFTP Used for secure file transfer over the internet Utilizes SSH encryption for security Port 22TCP Used for reliable, connection-oriented data transmission. No encryption, but data can be encrypted through additional protocols No default port, depends on the application.
Conclusion
To conclude it can be stated that the choice of protocol stack selected depends on the specific communication needs and security requirements of the data being transmitted. HTTPS is ideal for web-based applications that are why it is selected by Woolworths, while SFTP is best for secure file transfer as per the firm’s requirement. In addition to that, Woolworth also uses TCP, since it is best for reliable transmission of data, but requires additional security protocols for encryption.
Recommendations
Three recommendations are mentioned here in under: Incorporation of a robust security framework: one of the shortcomings associated with distributed architecture and distributed data storage, is that the notion of security breaches, which in turn can potentially result in data loss is not limited to a certain extent. Hence, the feasibility of losing credential information to unauthorized entities increases significantly. Therefore, it is quintessential for Woolworth to comprehend the gravity of the situation and consolidate the security framework, which include specific intrusion detection mechanism at each and every access control, so that while conducting regular security audits, it would assist the organization to determine vulnerability and address the circumstance accordingly (Gallagher, Blythe & Decker, 2021). Meticulously monitoring and optimizing performance: From an apparent vision it would seem that distributed system can enhance the performance. However, after it has accomplished a certain limit, the bottleneck paradigm comes into play, where system performance experiences the slanting curve. Optimization techniques such as load balancing, data sharing and caching are required as of this instance for Woodworth to enhance the overall network performance of the organization, so that it becomes much more scalable in nature. Inculcate recovery plan: The organization’s network backbone is not attributed with risk management plan, which is necessary if the organization experience security breach from malign entity. Unforeseen events and their consequences can only be safeguarded by the organization, provided it has a recovery plan, which is attributed with redundancy, data backups and failover mechanism. Not only it would assist the organization to reduce the downtime, but at the same time, the data loss in such circumstance would not impact the overall working function of the organization (Vercellis, 2020).
References
Gallagher, S., Blythe, D., & Decker, S. (2021). Communication system architecture for air traffic management and weather information dissemination. In 2001 IEEE Aerospace Conference Proceedings (Cat. No. 01TH8542) (Vol. 3, pp. 3-1327). IEEE.Parkinson, M. M., & Parkinson, M. M. (2018). Case Study 4: Woolworths Group plc. Corporate Governance in Transition: Dealing with Financial Distress and Insolvency in UK Companies, 203-221.Trammell-Keller, A. (2019). Dynamic Protocol Stacks (Doctoral dissertation, ETH Zurich).Vercellis, C. (2020). Business intelligence: data mining and optimization for decision making. John Wiley & Sons.Vilajosana, I., Llosa, J., Martinez, B., Domingo-Prieto, M., Angles, A., & Vilajosana, X. (2021). Bootstrapping smart cities through a self-sustainable model based on big data flows. IEEE Communications magazine, 51(6), 128-134.Wang, Y. (2022). A Survey and Research on Woolworths Customer Satisfaction. American Journal of Industrial and Business Management, 12(5), 1006-1011.Zeadally, S., Wasseem, R., & Raicu, I. (2018). Comparison of end-system IPv6 protocol stacks. IEE Proceedings-Communications, 151(3), 238-242.