Case Study on Information Systems: Integrated Customer Ordering Service at Marks & Spencer

Marks and Spencer is one of the leading retail organizations in UK which sell stylish, quality and great value clothing and home products , also quality food. They are one of the most popular brand among people not only in UK but globally. They have more than 600 stores in UK and constantly increasing many more around the world. It was founded when in 1884, Michael Marks opened a stall at Leeds Kirkgate Market. In 1901, its first registered store was located at Derby street, Manchester. By 1924 they started expanding and the head office moved from Manchester to London. Implementation of new policies and maintenance of services and value kept on adding to the success of Marks and Spencer.Continue reading

What is Agile Methodology?

Engineering methodologies required a lot of documentation thereby causing the pace of development to slow down considerably. Agile Methodologies evolved in the 1990s to significantly eliminate this bureaucratic nature of engineering methodology. It was part of developer’s reaction against “heavyweight” methods, who desired to drift away from traditional structured, bureaucratic approaches to software development and move towards more flexible development styles. They were called the ‘Agile’ or ‘Light Weight’ methods and were defined in 1974 by Edmonds in a research paper. Agile methodology is an approach to project management, typically used in software development. It refers to a group of software development methodologies based on iterative development. Requirements and solutions evolve through cooperation between self-organizing cross-functional teams, without concern forContinue reading

Uses of Virtual Private Networks (VPN)

A Virtual Private Network (VPN) is a point to point connection that connects a user to a private network in a different location. Basically, VPNs are used to set up a secure connection to the internet. A VPN works by creating a point to point connection from a public wifi connection to a private wifi connection in a business or company building as if you are directly connected to the network. Since the normally accepted definition for a network is fairly common and usually accepted throughout the trade. A network consists of any variety of devices which may communicate through some arbitrary technique. Devices of this nature include computers, printers, and routers will reside in geographically numerous locations. The strategiesContinue reading

Virtual Private Network (VPN) Tunneling Protocols

Virtual Private Network (VPN) create secure connections, called tunnels, through public shared communication infrastructures such as the Internet. These tunnels are not physical entities, but logical constructs, created using encryption, security standards, and protocols. The VPN tunneling protocols are set of standardized rules and policy that are employed on the transmitted data. There are various standard of protocol technologies used to create a VPN tunnel and each of these protocols is specially built with some unique security features. The most widely used Virtual Private Network (VPN) Tunneling Protocols are discussed below. Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) The Internet Protocol Security (IPSec) has proposed in Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Request for Comment (RFC) database in RFC (2401), provides data packet integrity,Continue reading

An Overview of Virtual Private Network (VPN) Technology

Virtual private networks (VPN) have gained popularity as a secure and cheaper medium for sensitive information to be accessed and transmitted between two or more corporate network over a public network such as the internet, other network technologies have been innovated and used to connect within business sites and across to other sites that are miles away from each other. In the sixties, sites were connected together to enable data transfer through the use of analog phone lines and 2,400-bps modems leased from AT&T, businesses had no other faster modems they could choose from because the telephone companies were controlled by the government. It was not until the early eighties that businesses were able to connect to sites at higherContinue reading

An Introduction to Cryptography and Digital Signatures

Cryptography The Greek words “krypt ´os” standing for “hidden” and the word “l ´ogos” that means “word”, are in essence the base from where the word cryptology was derived. As these words denote, cryptology can be best explained by the meaning “hidden word”. In this context, the original purpose behind cryptology is hiding the meaning of some specific combination of words which in turn would insure secrecy and confidentiality. This is a very limited viewpoint in today’s perspective and a wide range of security applications and issues now come under the term of cryptology (rest of the portion of this section will clarify this point of view). As field of mathematical science, Cryptology includes the study of both cryptanalysis asContinue reading