Target Corporation is probably the largest retail store in the United States, second only to the Walmart store. Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the company was initially called Goodfellow Dry Goods. The retail store established itself as the best-selling and revenue-generating division of the Dayton-Hudson Company, as it later became known. The store began to expand its business reaching nationwide operations around the 1980s and thus leading to the introduction of innovative store formats under the umbrella of the Target brand. The company's success can be attributed largely to its operation in the cheap-chic segment (Brad, 2016). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The vision of the company since inception has always been; 'Driven commitments to great value, community, diversity and the environment.' Furthermore, their mission is to make the Target store the preferred shopping destination for all its customers by essentially offering the best value and continuous innovation as well as offering an incredible and exceptional experience to their customers by ensuring that customer expectations are consistently meeting or even exceeding their expectations. By paying less, the brand promises to offer more. To support their mission, Target is driven by the urge to strive to provide maximum value, the drive to make the community around them a better place, and also the responsibility to care for the environment (Kolk, 2010). To offer products at affordable prices, Target Corporation is constantly looking for the best ways to control operating costs. Next, the company's IT department looks for the most cost-effective technology that can help easily deliver the expected value for the company. Target Technology Services is essentially the best strategic and enabler for almost all of the company's retail operations. The technology used is the basis of the customer experience in all Target stores. The level of reliability of the technology, which also includes the applications used at the point of sale, plays a crucial and integral role in helping the company deliver to its customers. Target's IT infrastructure is highly distributed with 300,000 endpoints or more. These endpoints include kiosks, terminal computers, servers, cash registers used in point-of-sale terminals, and even mobile devices used. The mobile devices used within the company are distributed across the company's 1,755 retail stores. All of the company's retail stores operate independently and autonomously, with the exception of the company's centralized authentication applications, endpoint activity monitoring services, and domain name resolution. Each Target store has its own control room and network with the ability to calculate its own capacity within the store. Among the main challenges faced by Target's IT infrastructure model are the frequent expansion of servers and the resulting increase in electricity costs and hardware requirements. Needless to mention, the rapidly growing and highly distributed infrastructure elements with hundreds of thousands of retail endpoints needing management also posed challenges that required the company to find a more effective virtualization solution. Using virtualization to consolidate hundreds of thousands of company servers means Target dedicates far less time and resources to the company's actual physical infrastructure. This will leavethe company has enough time and resources to dedicate to offering its customers the most incredibly exceptional experiences when shopping in their stores. Since all applications at point-of-sale terminals use the company's integrated IT architecture, the company requires databases for storage. Ideally, having quick and easy access to your storage platform is beneficial in numerous ways. Furthermore, the data stored in the company database is of utmost importance to the company especially in making decisions regarding the marketability of company products. Excellent performance, perfect operation of database applications and availability of information stored in databases are therefore crucial requirements for the company (Belikov et al., 2011). The best example of data mining applied by Target Corporation involves collecting customers' billing information, their website visits, and all customer service interactions along with other types of parameters to provide each customer with the probability score more appropriate to be interested in the target goods. Additionally, the company's other form of data mining is made possible by the company's retail outlets. Retail stores divide customers into groups, i.e. "Recency, Frequency, Monetary" subcategories. Retail then proceeds to target marketing and promote their merchandise to these groups. One of the most commonly used methodologies of network architecture is the strategy that is based on building an impenetrable and resistant exterior, to allow only users within the system to freely access network resources and at the same time prevent the unauthorized access by external users. This system safeguarding strategy can be attributed to the fact that only individuals within the system can have trust in the structures of the network. This network infrastructure strategy is adopted by Target Corporation. However, this strategy is not the most appropriate for the security of a system. For example, the target data breach was made possible through the use of this strategy. If an attacker gains access to the security credentials of a third party working with Target Corporation, they may also gain access to Target Corporation's network system. Subsequently, they can easily compromise network resources by using malware on any device used in any point-of-sale terminal (Krebs, 2014). As already mentioned, the security principle of granting internal users of systems the right to access all segments of the network without monitoring leaves the system vulnerable to attack threats. This is because, once the attacker gains access to one of the network segments, it becomes much easier for him to attack multiple network segments. The trust strategy of internal users of the network makes it vulnerable to attacks from internal segments of the system. A good example of this network vulnerability dates back to the massive data breach Target suffered. Additionally, Target Corporation never adopted the most appropriate methodologies for segmenting its network systems and therefore failed to effectively isolate the most sensitive resources in the network system from the most easily accessible sections of the network. The VLAN technique used by the company is reportedly easy to circumvent (Forester Research, 2013). Needless to mention, the company's point-of-sale terminals were not sufficiently powered to allow easy installation and subsequent configuration of unauthorized and malicious software into the system. The settings applied by the IT team led to theuniform spread of installed malware and therefore to the easy reading of sensitive and private customer card data from point of sale terminals. The first e-commerce site for Target was launched in 1999. Target launched the Target.com website as part of its discount retail division. Originally the website allowed advertising and the sale of merchandise which highlighted a clear distinction between the Corporation and competing stores. In early 2000, the company separated the existing operations of the e-commerce unit from the retail unit and later merged the operations with the direct marketing division of Rivertown Trading, thus making it an independent subsidiary. In August 2009, after parting ways with Amazon as a business partner, Target independently built and operated a new Target.com platform. The newly unveiled platform is an entirely online retail experience controlled exclusively by Target. The online platform is easier to use with a reinvention of the online environment of visiting and potential customers. As part of Target Corporation's initiative and efforts to get customers to always choose its stores for shopping, the company has made a series of very powerful technological improvements to all Target stores. Customers are benefiting greatly from new technological improvements. The cutting-edge technology used by Target makes the shopping experience at Target much easier, more convenient and faster. For example, if a customer doesn't find the item they want in the right size or color, they can place an order online using a mobile app and then have the item delivered to their home, instead of leaving the store empty-handed. The "myChechout" app used by Target Corporation is used on mobile devices mainly to search for available goods in store catalogs and the most desired products (Target, 2017). Key uses of web 2.0 and social media platforms were identified and conceptualized from the company's data. Internally, web 2.0 and other social media platforms are mainly used for basic internal communication and knowledge transfer within the organization. On the other hand, social media platforms are used externally to enhance communications related to facilitating better brand acuity of the company. Furthermore, social media platforms are essential for communicating with customers, building communities with various stakeholder groups and at the same time enabling the involvement of external parties interested in the company for idea generation, as well as providing a platform for seamless crowdsourcing. Target has a company system that tracks all purchases a customer makes in the store or online. If a customer calls customer services, they will be able to access the data in addition to all available notes from all other contacts. This is one of the most widely applied technical strategies used by Target to enable the effective and seamless delivery of services to customers while building its brand. The enterprise system used by Target allows for zero latency. This system strategy requires that any information entered into the system is immediately available to any user of the system. The primary application of this system strategy is to allow Target employees to easily obtain customer contact information to quickly respond to questions or concerns. Target also uses information printed on credit cards, has gone so far as to establish loyalty programs and even develop mailings.