Globex Corporation Case Study
Globex Corporation was founded in 2013 by the merger of two large regional business, Riverina Precision Farming, and B T & Sons Farming Equipment. Globex Corp is located in Wagga Wagga, NSW. Within Globex there are two arms to the business, Globex Farm Equipment, and Globex Precision Farming.
Globex Farm Equipment
The Globex Farm Equipment team has over 30 years of experience in agricultural business and are the largest in the Riverina region due to their vast inventory, yearsof experience and most importantly their commitment to serving farmers for the future. Globex FarmEquipment Sales, Parts and Service representatives have completed training on the newest technologies and are experts at helping famers plan for the future. They stock a wide range of new and used equipment enabling their customers a wide selection of units to choosefrom and with warehouses full of parts inventory they can promptly get the parts to meet customers need.
Globex Precision Farming
Globex Precision Farming solutions (formerly Riverina Precision Farming) enhance the efficiency of farming, so that farmers can quickly and easily improve everyday planning, decision-making and overall strategy for their operations. Globex Precision Farmingintegrates a wide range of positioning technologies including GPS, laser, optical and inertial technologies with application software, wireless communications, and services to provide complete commercial solutions. Its integrated solutions allow customers to collect, manage and analyze complex information faster and easier, making them more productive, efficient and profitable.
The company has a total of 23 staff, who include management, accounting, human resource, administration, marketing & sales, farming consultants, and IT sys admin staff. The company consists of the following staff:
- Management (2 staff)
- Accounting (1 staff)
- Human resource (1 staff)
- Administration (6 staff)
- Marketing & Sales (5 staff)
- Farming Consultants (4 staff)
- IT Systems Administration (4 staff)
The company has dedicated IT systems administration staff on site that are responsible for the management of networking and server infrastructure, but they are usually called upon to assist with other administrative tasks for the company. Effective systems administrationis somewhat hampered by the fact that the administrative passwords are generally wellknown across the company. Globex Corp employees enjoy free, open, unrestricted access to the Internet, but realisticallythey only need to access certain websites on the Internet. Company management would like to minimize the cost of accessing web resources.
Infrastructure
The company has a mixture of some newer and some relatively old PCs used as staff terminals. The company also has 5 MacBook laptops running OS X, which are mainly used by the sales staff.
The company uses several servers to conduct its core business.
- 1 x Active Directory domain controllers on Windows Server 2008 R2;
- 2 x SQL Server 2003 database server on Windows Server 2003;
- 2 x Windows Server 2003 File and Print servers;
- 1 x Exchange 2007 email server on Windows Server 2008 R2;
Each of these servers are independent machines with relatively vanilla installs of theirrespective operating systems. The servers are not running the latest operating systems, nor have they been recently patched. All servers have publicly accessible IP addresses and hence can be accessed from the Internet.
Services and Data
The servers store the following;
- User home directories;
- Mail;
- Active Directory Meta Data Object;
- Farm Equipment data directories;
- Precision Farming data directories;
- Corporate finance and personnel data;
- Web page data;
- Customer data;
- Market intelligence and strategic planning data;
Most services are only used within the company, however the company does have an internet presence via its web pages and mail server. Some of the Farming consultants also work from home in the evenings and access some services from their homeworkstations, tablets or mobile devices. Disks in the servers have not been setup for redundancy or fail over. In the event of a server diskloss, all data on the disk is lost and the service associated with it fails.
The most important data to the company, in order of importance, is:
- Corporate finance data
- Precision farming data directories,
- Farming equipment data directories,
- Strategic planning data
- Customer planning data,
- Personnel data,
- Web page data,
- Email,
The management of Globex insist that the integrity of this data must always be preserved. The company does not have a clear patching and update policy. As a result, most servers and desktops are patched on an ad-hoc basis and as time, and operations, permit.
Most of the staff in the company knows the administration passwords for the servers and desktops. It should be noted that all users have accounts on the mail, database and database servers.
The administration of the servers tends to be haphazard. There are often storage issues with storage as disks fill up regularly. There are a lot of active but unused accounts for users who havenow left the company. The company is dependent on its servers for continued access to services,but there are no monitoring systems in place.
