International Produce, a fictional packing company of canned fruits and vegetables, is headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and ships products to more than 40 countries. In addition to the headquarters, International Produce owns 12 regional distribution centers. Each distribution center uses RFID tracking to ship and inventory product as it is received and then distributed for local shipping.
In addition to the shipping and receiving functions, the distribution centers house accounting, human resources, and payroll staff who hire, fire, pay, and manage the day-to-day running of the distribution center.
International Produce has a layered approach to management of the data that it collects and stores. RFID data that is generated by the warehouse is sent directly to servers located in the Boston headquarters as part of a highly sophisticated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
This system has modules that would make this centralization possible for the personnel-related tasks, but the implementation of the RFID tracking component was so painful and so expensive that the senior management has opted to continue with the practice of leaving those activities to local managers. These local office networks are designed as individual LANs; however, at the end of each day, the office manager for each distribution center hooks the network to a local Internet service provider and uploads the day's data collection to the headquarters in Boston.
These local office managers hire local IT support to purchase and maintain the small number of devices and applications required to support the office. The RFID tracking software is off limits to local support and is managed only by corporate troubleshooters who have the task of traveling to any trouble spots and fixing them.
The network management service that International Produce hired to monitor activity on their global WAN sees an increase in the number of packets coming through the network between the distribution center in Mongolia and the Boston office.
The international nature of the business created a norm of traffic bursts appearing at all hours of the day and night, so this increase in traffic was not perceived as problematic until it was noticed that the traffic was not coming from Mongolia to Boston but was instead traveling from Boston to Mongolia.
The CIO of International Produce lives in your neighborhood and was recently chatting with you at the local National Night Out celebration where you shared details of your professional résumés. International Produce, as a privately owned company, has no regulatory requirements that would have made incident response planning a priority.
As such, when the CIO got the call from the network management service that something unusual appeared to be going on, your recent meeting where he learned you were an incident response consultant leapt to his mind and he called to ask if you are willing to take on the task to determine what it is that his IT staff should do in response to this situation.
Use the study materials and any research necessary to fill in knowledge gaps. Write a 2-3 page paper that covers the following:
How would you go about figuring out what resources are available to help you solve this situation?
What steps would you want to take in order to properly assess the situation?
What does having the unusual traffic going to Mongolia add to the complexity of resolving any potential incidents involving theft of intellectual property?
Assignment Requirements
Written communication: Written communication is free of errors that detract from the overall message.
APA formatting: Resources and citations are formatted according to APA (6th edition) style and formatting.
Length of paper: 2-3 pages, excluding the references page.
Font and font size: Times New Roman, 12 point.