Territory Technology Solutions wins Outback Stores' ICT tender
IT services specialists, Territory Technology Solutions (TTS), has won a three-year tender to provide communications, IT infrastructure, services and support to Outback Stores.
Outback Stores is a 27-site government-owned enterprise that manages stores on behalf of Australian Indigenous communities.
TTS has been providing communications infrastructure advice and services to Outback Stores for the past four years. The new contract expands this relationship and, for the first time, consolidates all of Outback Stores' ICT requirements under one services organisation.
“The appointment of a single ICT partner is an important step forward in ensuring greater consistency in ICT strategy and service across our business,” Outback Stores chief executive officer, Steve Moore, said.
Outback Stores was set up in 2006 as a Federal Government initiative, in response to a need for functional and viable shops that were able to meet the health and nutritional requirements of Indigenous populations. The company ensures that Indigenous communities have access to constant and affordable food supplies including nutritious foods, fresh fruit and vegetables.
Commonwealth and OpenText launch Web initiative
Commonwealth Secretariat and Global ECM company, OpenText, have announced plans to introduce Commonwealth Connects, a Cloud-based, global social media portal designed to connect people, organisations and governments across the Commonwealth.
The initiative, based on OpenText technology, is developed through contributions of Commonwealth countries – including Canada, India, Australia and Singapore.
According to Commonwealth, its decision to create Commonwealth Connects offers a Web platform and a single digital future for a community of diverse and vast countries.
“There are a whole range of important applications, including helping youth groups or government officials from across the Commonwealth collaborate; playing a role in election monitoring; or helping to fuel economic growth through digital business enablement,” Commonwealth secretary general, Kamalesh Sharma, said.
OpenText has had prior experience in helping government organisations develop digital strategies to serve key stakeholders, including citizens. It provides the social collaboration platform for the G-20 meetings, multiple national governments and Canada 3.0, dedicated to defining a digital strategy for Canada.
OpenText and the Commonwealth are also collaborating to help speed technology adoption in member countries of the Commonwealth by jointly supporting the development of effective national strategies for ICT adoption and use.
CA launches hybrid data protection solution
Software provider, CA Technologies, recently announced its CA ARCserve r16, a broad range hybrid data protection solution that assists customers and service providers in safeguarding the availability of critical data, applications and services across their virtual, conventional and Cloud resources.
The ARCserve r16 aims to unify data management functions through a scalable, modular architecture that facilitates integration with third-party software such as remote monitoring tools, management platforms and solutions from service providers.
All major components of CA ARCserve r16—including ARCserve Backup, ARCserve D2D and ARCserve Replication and High Availability—have been updated with significant enhancements – including new AES encryption and tightened integration between traditional and image-based backup.
A new offering, the CA ARCserve r16 Central Host-Based VM Backup, assists organisations to protect their virtual infrastructure with image-based host-level protection for VMware vSphere, as well as full system replication and high availability supporting Microsoft Hyper-V, VMware vSphere and Citrix XenServer.
The new CA ARCserve r16 Central Virtual Standby, enables customers to schedule the automatic conversion of image-based recovery points to VMware Virtual Disk or Microsoft Virtual Hard Disk formats.
The CA ARCserve r16 also includes:
- A common Cloud connection layer across all data protection components— including traditional file backup, disk imaging, replication and high availability.
- Ability for customers to use Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) as their disaster recovery infrastructure.
- Assistance to service providers and their customers to protect systems and data both locally and in the Cloud.
Customers can purchase multiple data protection functionalities with a single license based on the total amount of data they need to protect. According to the company, the licensing model makes it easier for service providers to price and package complete data protection and management solutions to their customers. CA ARCserve r16 is also available through traditional licensing models.
Context researchers find security vulnerability
Context Information Security researchers have identified a possible threat to insecurely configured web proxies that could allow hackers full internet access to internal or DMZ systems.
Context Information Security is an independent security consultancy.
Open-source software developer Apache Software Foundation, has issued a warning to its customers following the find, advising them to examine their configurations.
Context published a blog on its website detailing the issue as well as strategies to mitigate the risks. The attack was seen as specifically targeting Apache’s mod rewrite proxy function, which uses a rule-based rewriting engine to modify and rewrite web requests dynamically. This enables a forced request to access internal or DMZ systems which also open administrator interfaces on firewalls, routers, Web servers and databases.
Context Information Security research and development manager, Michael Jordon, said, “This latest vulnerability present is a potential back door to sensitive internal or DMZ systems but is totally avoidable if the reserve proxies are properly configured.” - Nermin Bajric
