The Australian Open grand slam tennis tournament is underway in Melbourne, and IBM is leveraging a global private cloud computing system for this year’s event which allows organisers, Tennis Australia, to rapidly scale its data in real time, as well as guarantee continuous availability even in the event of a complete data centre outage.

New Zealand’s largest full service financial institution, Westpac Life New Zealand, part of the Westpac Group, has standardised its systems on a platform from global data integration software provider, Informatica, to help power its strategic initiatives around customer centricity and big data.

The rapid adoption of cloud solutions will transform the traditional networking channel landscape in countries of the EMEA region -  Europe, the Middle East and Africa – as the market is fuelled by new technologies, changing customer demands, an alternate vendor landscape, and an uncertain regional economy.

Consumer demand for mobile data is exploding beyond market expectations, fuelled by new smartphones, apps and services, with the greatest demand coming from iPhone 4S users who have shown their huge appetite for information, demanding twice as much data as the iPhone 4 and 3G users.

Australian businesses are becoming soft targets for malicious hackers and they lag significantly behind their US and UK counterparts in achieving compliance with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) introduced by the Payment Card Industry Security Standards Council (PCI SSC), according to one security assessment company.

Although, according to Apple ,we live in the post-PC era there's still a disconnect between Apple's take on the tablet computer and a key feature that users need - that ability to access shared files on a network easily. The Kingston Wi-Drive goes some way to rectifying this.

Big data analytics, security and cloud computing will be three of the most significant drivers of technological change in 2012, according to a new report, which also predicts that CIOs will become major enablers of innovation for the business, playing a central role in operational & commercial strategy.

The Indian mobile market is forecast to grow from 812 million connections by the end of this year to 1.36 billion in 2020, but it’s not the increase in new subscribers, but the retention of existing customers, that one market analyst says should concern the country’s mobile operators.

The rapid shift of data centres to cloud-enabled services, mobile computing and 24x7 operations  is leading to unprecedented ways to create information that helps companies grow their businesses, but the changes mean many companies are now struggling to deal with the side effects of massive data growth, more demanding service levels for recovery and collapsing backup windows.

Private cloud services provider, OBT, has deployed a Melbourne node which it says will provide cloud services continuity, offering additional disaster recovery, high availability and failover services with the addition of the new point of presence in Melbourne.