Last night I posted my thoughts about a book I have been reading, How the World Ran Out of Everything: Inside the Global Supply Chain by Peter S. Goodman over on the What book have you read recently …. Goodman looked at the many points the supply chain broke down and the history of how it got so fouled up. One issue he did not cover was cyber security or the lack of it. Which brings us to this story.
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I would imagine someone encrypting their inventory data and demanding ransom would be a major problem for a grocery chain. Rebuilding that data base from scratch must require hundreds of hours. Paying ransom might look cheap.
Very worth installing better cyber security and ultra safe backup data storage.
Which leads to the question: What do people here think is the better buy – CRWD or PANW?
DB2
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But don’t stores do a visual inventory every so often anyway? Quarterly or annually for audit purposes? They have to to figure out their “shrinkage”
Mike
The story was about a grocery store. I hope they are doing inventory management on fresh foods more than quarterly.
Sure, but its a lot easier when you start with a list of your SKUs to count. No SKUs and getting it all together takes longer. Hopefully you have some safe backups somewhere that can be updated but if not you have lots of data to collect and enter.
OK, if everything is in the computer, little or no paper, how do you know what is where. Walk down the aisle and enter it as you go starting from scratch.
That is in the computer also. Did that exact project in a mfg environment. Given a grocery store, stuff will move from location to location, depending on the season/promotions/etc.
And now all that data is encrypted (or destroyed) unless you pay ransom or have good, safe back-ups. How do you recover? How long does it take to recreate all that data if you don’t pay ransom?
The less spent on back-ups/security, the more spent starting all over again.
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My brother used to do “store planning” for grocery stores. They were a broker, handling hundreds of different clients to make sure they got adequate shelf space (they were paying slotting allowances) in what quantities, at what height, and so on. He would typically do 4 or 5 “plan-o-grams” for different size stores, and since no two are perfectly alike depend on the people stocking the shelves to come “as close as possible” to the plan.
He worked from his bedroom, one of the first instances I knew of about “remote work” and had been doing so since the 90’s, maybe earlier. Stores would have multiple sources for this, perhaps one for beauty, another for snacks, etc. Some of the aisles are completely outsourced: Coke & Pepsi do their own distribution, keep inventory, collect the receipts from the automated tabs; the store is literally not involved in any way except to provide x amount of shelving.
Now he wold have no insight as to the actual inventory levels store by store, but it’s a stretch to say that it would take “months, if ever” for a store to recover, as there are plans for virtually every store in America (of not the world). Sure, they might have their inventory screwed with, they might run out of some things while it got sorted out, and yes, it would be inconvenient for the bean counters, but business would continue; there is tons of inventory “in transit” at all times (excepting wholesale supply chain issues as we saw in the pandemic) and life would go on.
You have doubtless seen worker bees doing an inventory count in the aisles from time to time, one of the ways they calculate shrinkage (although most of that happens before a product ever hits the shelf, in the back room, as it’s unloaded from the truck, scammy returns, and so on.)
Anyway, yeah, a hassle for the store chain, not at all threatening in any meaningful sense to the rest of us.
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A few years ago I couldn’t decide between CRWD or DDOG, so I invested in both. Neither one has disappointed, although CRWD’s recent screw up of their update roll out was pretty frustrating. Especially when you consider this was the 2nd company Kurtz ran that screwed up an update roll out. Grrrrrr. One mistake I can tolerate. But the same mistake twice is a yellow flag.
Cyber security isn’t going away anytime soon. Why not split the baby and buy both?
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Agreed. The major disruptor down the road will be quantum computing, but that’s probably a couple of Nobel prizes away.
Not a bad idea.
DB2
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