Target Corporation is arguably 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 its reputation as the top-selling and revenue-generating division of the Dayton-Hudson Company - as it later became known. The store began expanding its operations to a nationwide operation around the 1980s, leading to the introduction of innovative store formats under the Target brand umbrella. The company's success can largely be attributed to its operation in the cheap and chic sector (Brad, 2016). Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The vision of the company since its inception has always been: ; “Guided commitments to great value, community, diversity and the environment.” Additionally, their mission is to make the Target store the preferred shopping destination for all its customers, essentially by providing the best value and continuous innovation, in addition to providing an incredible and exceptional experience to its customers ensuring that customer expectations are consistently met and even exceeded. By paying less, the brand promises to offer more. In order to support their mission, Target is guided by the need to remain committed to providing the greatest value, the desire to make the community around it a better place and also the responsibility to care for the environment (Kolk, 2010 ). In order to offer products at affordable prices, Target Corporation is constantly looking for the best ways to control its operating costs. Subsequently, the company's IT department searches for the most cost-effective technology that would easily deliver the expected value to the business. Target Technology Services is essentially the best strategic and enabling element for almost all of the company's retail operations. The technology used is the foundation of the customer experience in all Target stores. The level of technological reliability, which even includes 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 or more endpoints. These endpoints include kiosks, endpoint computers, servers, checkouts used on point-of-sale terminals, and even mobile devices used. Mobile devices used within the company are distributed among the company's 1,755 retail stores. All of the company's retail stores operate independently and autonomously, except for 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 capacity within the store. Among the major challenges faced by the IT infrastructure model adopted by Target are the frequent sprawl of servers and the consequent increase in electricity costs and hardware requirements. Needless to mention, the rapidly growing and highly distributed infrastructure elements, with hundreds of thousands of retail locations requiring management, also posed challenges that required the company to find a more efficient virtualization solution . Using virtualization to consolidate hundreds of thousands ofThe company's servers mean that Target spends far less time and resources on the company's actual physical infrastructure. This will give the company ample time and resources to dedicate to providing its customers with the most incredibly exceptional experiences while shopping at their stores. Since all POS terminals use the company's integrated IT architecture, the company requires databases for storage. Ideally, having quick and easy access to the storage platform has many benefits. Additionally, the data stored in the company's database is of utmost importance to the company, especially in making decisions regarding the marketing of its products. High performance and seamless operability of database applications as well as the availability of information stored in databases are therefore crucial requirements for the business (Belikov et al., 2011). The best example of data mining applied by Target Corporation involves collecting customers' billing information, their visits to websites, and all their interactions with customer service, among other types of metrics, to give each customer the score most suitable probability of being interested in Target's Merchandise. Additionally, the company's other form of data mining is enabled by the company's retail outlets. Retail stores compartmentalize customers into groups i.e. “Recency, Frequency, Monetary” subcategories. Retailers then target their marketing and product promotion to these groups. One of the most commonly used network architecture methodologies is the strategy based on building an impenetrable and solid exterior, to allow only users inside the system to freely access network resources while simultaneously preventing unauthorized access by external users. This system backup strategy can be attributed to the fact that only people inside the system can be entrusted with network installations. 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 that works in conjunction with Target Corporation, they can also gain access to Target Corporation's network system. Subsequently, they can then easily compromise network resources by using malware on any device used at any POS terminal (Krebs, 2014). As mentioned above, the security principle of granting internal users of systems the right to access all segments of the network without surveillance makes 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 them to attack more network segments. The network strategy of trusting internal users of the network makes it vulnerable to attacks from interior segments of the system. A good example of this network vulnerability dates back to the massive data breach suffered at Target. Additionally, Target Corporation has never adopted the most appropriate methodologies for segmenting its network systems and therefore has failed to effectively isolate its most sensitive assets in the network system from the sections most easilyaccessible from the network. The VLAN technique used by the company would be easy to circumvent (Forester Research, 2013). Needless to say, the company's point-of-sale terminals were not sufficiently hardened to allow easy installation and subsequent configuration of unauthorized and malicious software into the system. The settings applied by the IT team enabled smooth propagation of installed malware and thus easy reading of sensitive and private customer card data from point-of-sale terminals. Target's first e-commerce site was launched in 1999. Target launched the Target.com website as part of the discount retail division. The website originally allowed advertising and the sale of merchandise that clearly distinguished the company from competing stores. In early 2000, the company separated the already existing operations of the e-commerce unit from the retail unit and subsequently combined the operations with the direct marketing division of Rivertown Trading, thereby made an autonomous and independent subsidiary. In August 2009, after parting ways with Amazon as a sales associate, Target built and independently managed a new Target.com platform. The newly unveiled platform is a completely online retail experience controlled solely by Target. The online platform is more user-friendly with a reinvention of the online environment for visiting and potential customers. As part of Target Corporation's initiative and efforts to encourage customers to always choose their stores to shop, the company has made a host of powerful technology enhancements to all Target stores. Customers benefit 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 can't find the item they want in the right size or color, they can place an order online via a mobile app and then have the item delivered to their home, instead of leave the store empty-handed. The “myChechout” application used by Target Corporation is used on mobile devices to search for, among other things, merchandise available in store catalogs and the most sought-after products (Target, 2017). The main uses of Web 2.0 and social media platforms were identified and conceptualized using company 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 improve communications related to better visibility of the company's brand. Additionally, social media platforms are essential for communication with customers, for creating communities with diverse stakeholder groups while simultaneously enabling the engagement of external parties interested in the business for idea generation, in plus providing a transparent crowdsourcing platform. Target has a corporate system that tracks every purchase a customer makes in-store or online. If a customer calls customer service, they will be allowed access to the data in addition to any notes available from all other contacts. This is one of the most widely applied technical strategies by Target to enable the efficient and transparent delivery of services to customers while strengthening its brand. The business system..