Security / Interviews

“We continue to innovate on many fronts, in many countries,” says Kevin Drinkwater, CIO at Mainfreight.

Robert Holmes provides CIO and CTO services not only to the Origin Group, but also to their customers.

Tina Wakefield says major programmes are being implemented around business intelligence analytics at the Ministry of Justice.

“ICT has developed a pathway for how we will move towards digital courts, which reflect our goal of building people-centred justice services,” says Tina Wakefield, Deputy Secretary ICT/CIO at the Ministry of Justice.

We have been able to significantly reduce the overhead of our core systems and services over a number of years, through the strong adoption of I/P/SaaS, re-architecting and consolidating many core platforms to reduce licensing and maintenance costs, virtualisation as the default position, outsourcing non-core IT activities and simplifying systems and processes (never ending) to enable minimal customisation, says Geoff Leigh, CIO at Kordia.

“Westpac New Zealand’s challenge has been to transform from a formal and somewhat less efficient organisation, into one that can create great customer experiences rapidly, responding to opportunities and threats alike,” says the bank’s CIO, Dawie Olivier.

Martin Casado, who helped launch the Software Defined Networking concept in the labs at Stanford, was recently elevated to the top business slot in VMware's Networking and Security Business Unit, giving him the rare opportunity to see the technology through from the incubator to the data center. Network World Editor in Chief John Dix sat down with Casado for an update on the company and his thoughts on how the technology is maturing.

With a number of high-profile security breaches making headlines of late, organizations are increasingly realizing they must beef up their security teams or risk catastrophe. Matt Comyns, global co-head of the Cybersecurity practice at Russell Reynolds Associates, an executive leadership and search firm, sat down with CIO.com to discuss the changing role of the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), the global cybersecurity landscape and why finding and retaining elite security talent is critical.

What are the implications for enterprises and the security issues regarding fingerprint scanning? Anthony Tian, Regional Director, Asia Pacific, Good Technology, gives his thoughts.

Matt Tucker proudly shows off the new Les Mills New Zealand headquarters in the Auckland CBD, only a few hundred metres from where the fitness chain’s namesake and his wife opened their first gym in 1968.
“It’s been a great ride, and I think we’re headed towards some pretty exciting things very soon,” says the CIO of the fitness chain. Les Mills has 45,000 members across 11 gyms located around the country, with its latest gym opening in Britomart late last year.

Taupo accountancy firm Strettons has turned to StorageCraft ShadowProtect backup and restore software after a new server kept crashing.

In a perfect world, your network would suffer no downtime and be locked down tight. You'd be in perfect compliance with all government regulations, and your users would all be self-supporting. The cloud would take care of nearly all your infrastructure needs, and there wouldn't be a single device accessing the network you didn't first approve of and control.

The threats and challenges you face have not changed much in the past year, but you are finding a better recipe for protecting your corporate data and networks, according to our eighth annual Global Information Security Survey.
"There is a real sense of tension in this year's numbers; a sense that with the change in the economy there has been a resetting of expectations," says Mark Lobel, a principal in the advisory services division of PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), which conducted the study on behalf of CIO and CSO.

On the day of the 7.1 magnitude earthquake that struck Canterbury, Gavin Till, IM&CT Business Unit Manager at the Christchurch City Council, counted his lucky stars.
Had the former civic office on Tuam Street — and the old datacentre still within — sustained more damage than it did, and if the full data outsource to the new data centre hadn’t finished just minutes before the quake, staff and emergency crews could have been hamstrung for hours, possibly days, without access to critical IT applications and services.

For two years, the technology team at Bank of New Zealand (BNZ) has been working on a project to put an end to “skimming” of credit cards.
The practice refers to the capturing of information on the magnetic stripe of a card to create a clone credit card. The card holder is then billed – six months to a year later – for purchases they never made and often in places they have not visited.

The FIFA World Cup games kick off on June 11 in South Africa. One of the largest sporting events in the world, it features multiple games occurring across numerous cities, posing myriad logistical and communication challenges in an already volatile, high crime area.

In 2006 Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) CIO David Spaziani was handed the task of assembling the Department’s disparate ICT silos into a coherent whole. The department-wide change process not only achieved this, it did so without an increase in budget or the wholesale exodus of staff, Spaziani said at the recent CIO Leaders’ Luncheons in Auckland and Wellington.
New Zealand’s Department of Internal Affairs has been dubbed the “mother of all departments”. It reports to six ministers, administers more than 90 Acts and Regulations, and employs 1400 staff in 21 offices here and overseas.

Security experts say it all the time: If a company thinks it has suffered a data security breach, the key to getting at the truth unscathed is to have a response plan in place for what needs to be done and who needs to be in charge of certain tasks. And, as SANS Institute instructor Lenny Zeltser advised in CSOonline's recent How to Respond to an Unexpected IT Security Incident article, "ask lots and lots of questions" before making rash decisions.

Jeff Olsson has a consuming need for speed, but not at any price.
As the group executive for technology at the Australian Securities

When he started in 2002, as Macmahon Holdings' chief information officer, Jason Cowie found the company's IT division had a poor reputation for internal service.
Macmahon's business takes its employees to many inaccessible locations; its work includes the management of mines and infrastructure projects such as roads, bridges and dams, across more than 50 locations and offices throughout Australia, New Zealand and Malaysia.