Michael Crawford

Westpac Bank has admitted that IT security has been the one casualty of its 10-year, A$4.3 billion (US$3.3 billion) IT outsourcing deal with IBM GSA which was inked in the year 2000.

The customization of off-the-shelf software is the weakest link in application security. This is particularly true for widely used enterprise products such as SAP and Oracle, according to Gartner research director Rich Mogull.

Draft standards and an interoperability framework for all Australian public sector agencies has been released in preparation for the federal government's billion dollar smartcard rollout.

Figures from the 2005 audit of security management of Internet security in Australian government agencies conducted by the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) was released yesterday and found 31 specific risks as defined by the Defence Signals Directorate (DSD) in agency Web servers.

When business decisions confronted Axa Tech with the daunting task of relocating 300 servers from Japan to Melbourne it considered all its options, including the use of cargo ships. But rather than drown in the relocation of so much hardware as part of a year-long data consolidation project, the financial services firm turned to a mix of server virtualization and WAN acceleration.

A U.S. mandate that airline passenger information be sent to the American government prior to arrival has come into question following a decision last week in the European Court of Justice that brands the process as illegal.

The first awareness program into standards development for Australia's EHR initiative has called for more vendor involvement into developing standards.

Cisco Systems Inc. has released patches for eight of its products after the Melbourne-based Internet security company Assurance Pty Ltd.'s Assurance.com.au discovered vulnerabilities in some of the vendor's wireless products.