There’s never a good time for bank networks to crash – but Friday, when people are shopping or cashing up for the weekend is about the worst. National Australia Bank was today at full tilt to fix its latest computer headache which saw customers unable to use the ATM or Eftpos network for much of the day.

The $33 million Personal Property Security Register built by Fujitsu for the Attorney General’s department has endured a fraught first fortnight. By some estimates it may take another three months for the already delayed system to be operating smoothly.

Hitachi GST claims its latest Ultrastar solid state drives are the first enterprise-class SSDs to use 25 nanometre SLC NAND flash memory technology.

Software testing services company, TestPro, has selected IBM’s smartcloud enterprise solution to increase the flexibility and timeliness of its IT service delivery.

Australia’s peak ICT industry body is bringing Vivek Kundra, the former White House CIO and author of the Obama government’s Cloud First policy to inject some “fact” into the debate surround cloud uptake. Today of course Mr Kundra is an executive vice president with Salesforce.com – a company with a vested interest in talking up the cloud.

At a time when banks are shedding IT roles by the dozen, it seems counter-intuitive that 83 per cent of the nation’s chief information officers should report they are confident about the future of their business to the extent that 45 per cent expect to hire IT staff in the first six months of the year. The question remains – is this a dead cat bounce?

St George Bank’s website reappeared on Monday evening after prolonged "technical issues” – although it remained possible while the web site was off air to log on and use the online banking and business banking services suggesting that the core banking systems (the Hogan platform supplied by CSC) weren’t affected.

There’s a big hole in Australian IT spending with 15 per cent of businesses admitting that they don’t spend a red cent on disaster recovery or business continuity services. It’s even worse internationally where 22 per cent of companies spend zilch on the issue.

The challenges which enterprises are facing in terms of managing ballooning end user data stores, and information stored on virtual servers or in clouds, has prompted CommVault to update its Simpana suite of information management tools, bringing forward the release of some functions originally slated for inclusion in Simpana 10 which isn’t expected to be released before 2013.

Surveys by a major analyst firm reveals that Apple products are becoming common in the workplace, and that enterprises plan to buy more Macs.