Organisations are always looking at means of delivering more with less.

Selecting the right platform for your applications and especially their data, has a great bearing on the ongoing value that your applications will provide for your business and your customers.

The costs of acquiring and installing the hardware and software and developing the applications are only part of the equation. Keeping ongoing costs down while attempting to store and manage more data, maintain application performance, ensure recoverability within agreed SLAs and minimise the expense and inconvenience of routine maintenance presents a major dilemma. This is where a considered Information Lifecycle Management strategy can help.

Furthermore, for most organisations, the cost of printed output is the third highest expense that they have to deal with; only human resource and premises costs rate higher. However, few organisations have the information or the tools available to proactively monitor and manage their printing infrastructure. As a result, they are locked into a situation where printed output costs a lot more than it needs to.

Malware is a generic term used to describe any malicious program. Malware can take a variety of forms:

• Viruses;
• Worms;
• Trojans;
• Spyware

With malware becoming more and more widespread, and further inconvenience and expense being incurred through ever-increasing amounts of unsolicited email (spam), it is vitally important that no computer is left unprotected.

Palantir Systems are New Zealand resellers for a number of world-class security solutions from Norman ASA.

All organisations must comply with local (and sometimes global) data retention and data privacy regulations, depending on where, how and with whom they conduct their business. Failure to comply with the various regulations could result in severe penalties being imposed on the organisations or individual members of their management teams.

Although the requirements vary, most of these regulations mandate that organisations retain data for a specific number of years and to ensure that the privacy of data relating to individuals is protected. Specific industry regulations govern the amount of time that data must remain available for easy access, and all compliance regulations require that data remains in its original business context.

Furthermore, as we have seen in recent New Zealand court cases, the ability to provide information when required, and to be able to demonstrate that the associated trail of data is intact, is important to the confidence of legislators, investors and potential customers.