Yesterday, Woolworths supermarkets around the country had to close their doors as the result of a massive IT outage. An IT issue resulted in point of sale systems going offline which meant products couldn't scanned and the all important collection of money couldn't be done. So, what can we learn from this?

The modern enterprise no longer has a monolithic application and infrastructure stack housed purely within its own data centre. Australia has embraced virtualisation at some of the highest levels in the world and we are bounding forward in adopting cloud services as well. This is completely changing the way we protect our data and ensure high levels of availability. At the recent VeeamON Forum, held in Sydney, I spoke with Veeam's Co-CEO Peter McKay about what the company is doing around those challenges and how he is travelling after a year of sharing the CEO job.

During the opening keynote for Cloud Day at VeeamON, Veeam announced the availability of the release candidate version of their new backup solution Veeam PN (Veeam Powered Network). Veeam PN for Microsoft Azure is designed to simplify and automate the setup of a disaster recovery site in Azure using software-defined networking (SDN). And, given what I saw during a demonstration given by Aussie technical evangelist Anthony Spiteri, it looks like a very powerful tool that is offered at the bargain price of free.