Up until recently, Queensland's Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) was "flying blind" when it came to managing the performance of its network, says its ICT infrastructure manager, Dean Coulter.
BT Global Services is putting the final touches on a new purpose-built cyber security operations centre in Sydney as the organisation looks to triple worldwide revenue from its security business over the next three years.
The threat of cyberattacks continues to overwhelm many organisations, and it’s simply not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when’ corporate networks will be breached by hackers.
Fire & Rescue NSW (FRNSW) sees a future where its 7,500 staff can access technology services anywhere from any unmanaged, web-connected device, as the organisation re-engineers its back-end systems to support a mobility strategy.
The Queensland government is rolling out Microsoft Office 365 to 149,000 government staff across its agencies in a deal that is expected to reduce its IT costs by $13.7 million over the next three years.
Web browser or Office suite? Microsoft's and Google's office productivity and collaboration clouds pit rich and complex against simple and lean
Latest blend of Exchange, SharePoint, and Lync servers in the cloud combines an excellent feature set with easier setup and management
The shortfalls of Google Apps will likely resonate with the inordinate amount of Microsoft shops in the industry. Years of investment in SharePoint developers, Exchange support teams and business processes built around the fickle aspects of Microsoft Office and its ribbon interface cannot be discarded easily. That’s ultimately where Microsoft’s strength is likely to reside. No matter when its Office 365 bundle is released, and despite numerous attempts to forge links between legacy applications and Google Apps, the complexity of a migration for a large organisation would likely be a headache most CIOs are eager to avoid. At least, that can be said for Coca Cola Amatil CIO, Barry Simpson.
Ultimately, some of the problems facing Microsoft’s Cloud strategy are those affecting many of its long-standing product suites. “Clearly Microsoft is trying to back-solve that problem to the legacy product set and clearly that’s problematic,” AAPT’s chief operating officer and effective CIO, David Yuile, says.
IT behemoths, Microsoft and Google, have for years been embroiled in battles over who would control the move by different industries to the Cloud. Since at least 2007, Australian universities and education authorities eager to outsource their email have turned to either provider in lieu of limited competition from the market. For the next battle, however, the stakes are higher. Both Google and Microsoft are betting all of their chips on a sector that is likely to prove much more lucrative than any before it: Enterprise.
When Canadian food distributor George Weston Limited moved to Microsoft Office 365, it chose F5 Application Delivery Controllers to centrally manage user traffic to its Active Directory Federation Services (ADFS) servers.