Harvard Ipremier Case Study

iPremier Case Study

iPremier positioned themselves as a company who targeted high end customers by selling rare, luxury and vintage items were known for acquiring staff who are very goal oriented and would do anything it takes to pursue their goals, such as launching Their competitive advantage lay in their "responsive and attractive website", which was superior to those of their competitors and by being an industry leader in user experience on their website.

iPremier suffered a DOS (Denial of Service) attack in the middle of the night and customers were not able to access their website.  Emergency procedures could not be followed as they were not accessible and also out of date.  Executives at iPremier what exactly led to the DOS attack and what data was lost, if any.

The cause of the problem was their overreliance on QData for their IT services. iPremier outsources their IT services to Qdata, who hosts their computer equipment, provides Internet connectivity, monitors company websites as well as providing Internet security services.  Qdata is not a market leader in their industry.  Their hardware is not technologically up to date as they have not made any recent investments on their hardware and they are lacking in operating procedures, particularly in business continuity planning.  Emergency operating procedures were also out of date at iPremier.

There are several alternatives available to iPremier in order to prevent future DOS attacks.  They can replace QData, develop their own IT department or recreate the technical architecture with Qdata.  By replacing QData with another, more established IT services company, iPremier would have to source a new vendor who have more technologically advanced hardware, as well with more secure protocols and procedures.  An example would be cloud data management company, such as Amazon Web Services.  The benefit would be more secure IT services, as well decreasing the risk of another DOS attack.  However, this could be a very costly and timely process and could lead to an erosion in the relationship between iPremier and Qdata.  There is also no guarantee that the new vendor will perform better than Qdata.

 Another alternative would be for iPremier to develop their own IT department in order to manage, their own IT services.  This would include purchasing new or upgrading existing hardware, hiring or training staff to manage the IT, as well as establish business continuity planning procedures.  This would give iPremier more control over their IT processes and lower administration costs.  The downside of this approach would be that it would be time consuming, expensive and will a long time to be fully implemented.  Also, there is would go against the iPremier culture of getting things done at all costs, since there would have to be considerable investment in would some would deem as a support activity.