Managed Services - News, Features, and Slideshows

News

• WA Department of Housing signs $11.3M managed services deal

  The Western Australia Department of Housing has signed a new $11.3 million contract with ASG Group (ASX: ASZ) for IT managed services.

• Rackspace supercharges MongoDB service

  Rackspace is now offering hosted versions of the MongoDB data store, using MongoDB management technologies it acquired from its purchase of ObjectRocket in February. It also has contracted with 10gen, the company shepherding the open source MongoDB, to provide advanced support for the service.

• Unisys extends DIAC IT services contract

  The Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship (DIAC) has extended its IT services agreement with Unisys for another five years in a deal valued at $104.1 million.

• Red Hat's OpenShift PaaS goes live

  After two years of beta testing, the Red Hat OpenShift Online platform as a service (PaaS) has been pressed into commercial use, charging customers and offering professional commercial support.

• Amazon's RDS database gets SLA, becomes generally available

  After three and a half years in operation, Amazon Web Services' RDS is finally generally available, and users can also get a service-level agreement if they choose to run the database in multiple places.

• NEC to provide ICT support to MPs and senators

  NEC Australia won a three-year contract with the Department of Parliamentary Services to provide managed ICT services and support to 260 electorate offices of Australian senators and members of Parliament across the country.

• Citrix links cloud-based storage to SharePoint and Azure

  Citrix Systems is making its cloud-based storage service ShareFile more Microsoft-friendly with SharePoint integration and the ability to store data on Azure.

• Rackspace to help customers debug their programs

  Facing fierce competition in the market for cloud services, hosting provider Rackspace has pledged to help its users debug the programs they'll run on Rackspace's OpenStack platform.

• Optus Business restructure integrates Alphawest, NCS

  Optus has completed a business restructuring that integrates Optus Business with Alphawest and SingTel subsidiary NCS. The groups, which serve enterprise and government customers, previously operated separately.

• 10gen expands MongoDB with storage service

  Open source database provider 10gen is expanding into storage services, offering a hosted backup service for its flagship MongoDB data store.

• Amazon looks to move security appliances to the cloud, says CISO

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is looking to expand its security offerings with hosted intrusion protection appliances and more extensive encryption features, as it looks to increase the level of protection users can get in its cloud.

• Google BigQuery update aims for enticing Hadoop users

  Hoping to lure more Apache Hadoop users to its own data analysis services, Google has outfitted BigQuery with the ability to query multiple data tables.

• Uniscon document exchange service uses two-factor authentication, stores no passwords

  Uniscon's IDgard, a service for securely exchanging documents between companies and their clients or partners, uses two-factor authentication and stores only its customers' encrypted data on the server, with no passwords or hashes for hackers to steal.

• AWS offers a free month of automated system analysis

  Amazon Web Services (AWS) is offering users a month-long free trial of a set of system analysis tools that the company is developing. The free offer is one of a number of price cuts and expanded services the company has introduced in the past few weeks.

• Profile IT: Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras

  Sydney's Mardi Gras is the highest profile annual event in Australia for members of the country's lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex communities. And although the event has its origins as a political protest, and some parade participants still take aim at the inequalities and violence suffered by non-heterosexual people in Australia, it's also big business.