In July's feature we looked at the recent trend of vendors offering pre-integrated packages of infrastructure, combining servers, storage and networking in the one physical box. This month Andrew Collins wonders how these integrated boxes fit into a security strategy.

Thorough quality assurance is crucial to effectively deploying new IT systems. Nick Finlayson, Capgemini Australia’s Head of Testing Services, discusses how to choose the right outsourced testing partner for your organisation.

Data is a vital business asset for most organisations. Although high-availability technologies significantly reduce the probability of data loss, events such as technical failure, virus attacks, deliberate sabotage or employee error can still destroy data. Therefore, organisations must plan for data recovery and implement mechanisms for managing the data recovery process, says CA’s Scott Caulfield.

Hardware, storage management software and document management software all stake a claim for tiering duties claims Simon Sharwood. Storage tiering is a hot theme, and rightly so, because it can lower costs and is an important way to use the speed of solid state disks to your advantage.

‘Traditional’ customer relationship management (CRM) - meet client, determine demand, head back to office, determine stock/seal deal - no longer suffices when time is of the essence. CRM imperatives today require customer information and business intelligence ‘on the go’.

Anti-malware security suite testing receives a lot of attention, but it's important to appreciate that different testing methods can produce vastly different and even misleading results. A decent security suite is greater than the sum of its parts: it's designed in layers to thwart various attacks at various stages. Testing individual components of a security suite on their own - or testing in an environment that doesn't reflect real-world conditions - often fails to give an accurate picture of a security suite's overall performance.

The Australian Information Industry Association has welcomed the focus on communications, broadband and the digital economy being brought to the national election campaign by the Australian Government. [ + ]

The time lapse between the beginning of publicly available internet and what we now refer to as Web 2.0 was short. A relative nanosecond in terms of history. Rob Forsyth jumps forward from the history of the internet to social media and advocates that organisations need to embrace security to enable as much access to technologies as possible under a robust security framework.

Having been CIO of South East Water in Victoria for six years has not diminished Marcus Darbyshire’s excitement for the job. In fact, he says he has the best job in the company. How many people can say that and actually mean it? Voice&Data’s Merri Mack finds out why.

For all its advantages, virtualisation brings some unique challenges. Data centre power consumption may be lower but each server draws more power; and while there are fewer servers, each one becomes more critical than ever. Each beneficial change has flow-on effects that need to be managed. The good news is that there are practical and affordable ways to address all these challenges, and improve data centre efficiency in the process. Who better to explain than Eaton’s Craig Gob.

Innovations in cloud storage services are causing a growing number of enterprises to take notice. After all, keeping up with data growth using the traditional storage model is fast becoming a challenge. Compounding this issue are the challenges of supporting a growing number of critical applications as well as rich media types while also meeting demanding service level requirements within strict budget constraints.

Forget separate stacks of networking, storage and servers. The latest trend among vendors and service providers is to offer complete, pre-integrated unified infrastructure platforms. Andrew Collins looks at whether integration equals innovation.

How to modernise your legacy applications through rapid service enablement.

Server virtualisation and blade servers may be driving data centre consolidation and changing the way networks are built; they tend to result in more complex network designs. While these technologies are delivering impressive efficiencies on the server side, their impact on rising numbers of network tiers in the data centre is significant.

In the last few years, the data centre industry has been under increasing financial pressure driven by new IT technologies and rising energy costs. Christian Bertolini, APC by Schneider Electric, Chief Technology Officer, Pacific, sets out ways to alleviate these pressures and costs.