IBM Australia's workforce has been cut from 6,463 to 5,489 people - a loss of almost 1000 jobs - following a 68 per cent fall in profit.

In the coming years we will see AI used in more ways and in applications we can scarcely imagine. This is a space IBM has been very active in, particularly through their Watson project. With people using more devices and the expected explosion in end-points with the IoT, they've applied their Watson tech to the challenge of endpoint management.

Remember the #censusfail incident last year when millions of Australians were unable to fill out the mandatory Census online because the website was slammed by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack? It appears the ABS was overconfident about the website's ability to fend of a DDoS attack.

IBM and Nextgen have been blaming each other for the failure of Census 2016. Based on today's Senate Economics References Committee hearing into #CensusFail, it appears both companies were at fault to some extent. Nextgen may have incorrectly implemented geoblocking aimed at mitigating distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks while IBM acknowledged it should have a real test of its router's resilience to failure. But Alastair MacGibbon, the Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, has laid the blame predominantly on IBM for failing to handle relatively small DDoS attacks that shouldn't have brought down the Census website.

IBM has been thrown under the bus ever since #CensusFail happened back in August. Big Blue was the IT contractor that was hired to run the Census website, which went down for nearly two days after being hit by repeated distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks. IBM's upstream provider for the Census, Nextgen, has since came out and accused IBM of refusing DDoS protection when it offered. IBM has admitted that it did indeed reject Nextgen's DDoS protection solution, and here's why.

This year's Census was nothing short of a spectacular debacle after the website where Australians were to fill out the survey went down for nearly two days. Last night, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) chief David Kalisch fronted the Senate Estimates in parliament to answer questions about the incident. We found out that the ABS will have to spend around $30 million to fix the damage. He also admitted that the ABS made a number of poor judgement calls for Census 2016. Here's what he had to say along with a recap of what has happened since the Census outage occurred two months ago.

2016 will be remembered as the year technology giant IBM hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons. They’ve been blamed, almost completely, by the ABS for what’s now known as #censusfail. IBM has recently sacked a couple of staff over the incident but I think there’s more to it.

In the wake of the Census debacle that happened this week, there's been a lot of finger-pointing as to who was to blame. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has put the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) and IBM, the company hosting and managing the Census website, on notice, expressing his disappointment over Tuesday's website meltdown. Well, he's going to be even more disappointed today as the Census website went down again last night. It's looking more likely that IBM will be shouldering the majority of the blame for the Census disaster. Read on to find out more.

The Australian Signals Directorate has confirmed that no data was compromised amidst the Census debacle of the past couple of days.

Recently, I caught up with a friend who works in IT security and the topic of data breaches came up in conversation. He said it used to be hard to convince stakeholders in an organisation about the costs of data breaches; brand damage is difficult to quantify in dollars. But thanks to major data leakage incidents from the likes of Sony and Telstra in recent years, protection of digital information is now being taken seriously. A new report by the Ponemon Institute looks closer at the hard costs associated with data breaches and examines what methods organisations can adopt to reduce that cost. Read on to find out more.

In a bit of industry news: A former IBM employee in China has charged with economic espionage after he was arrested for stealing and attempting to sell proprietary source code that IBM owned. He had tried to sell the code to undercover FBI agents in the US. Here are the details.

IBM Watson is a cognitive computing platform that uses artificial intelligence to essentially "think" for itself. A new cloud-based version of the technology dubbed Watson for Cyber Security has just been announced — and its coming after hackers.

The phrase "cognitive computing" is often bandied about when discussing artificial intelligence, data mining and deep machine learning. But what does it actually mean? During Nvidia's GTC technology conference, IBM Watson's chief technology officer Rob High gave a perfect distillation of this complex topic.

IBM has ramped up efforts to make mainframes sexy again by adding hybrid cloud capabilities, along with other goodies, to its LinuxOne offering. The Linux-based mainframe was released last year with ability to scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here's what you need to know.

Apple made Swift, it's programming language for iOS, OS X and watchOS, open source last week. Clearly IBM is excited because it has responded swiftly (sorry, couldn't resist) by releasing the Swift Sandbox tool which lets you write and execute Swift code in a Linux server environment. Here are the details.

IBM has come out with some powerful hardware which aims to boost the popularity of mainframe servers running the Linux open source OS in large organisations. The vendor has introduced the LinuxOne line with a mainframe that can scale out to 8000 virtual servers. Here's more information on the announcement.

Microsoft wants to become a leader in machine learning and has been spruiking the wonders of this technology in helping businesses make better decisions. That's good and all, but does Microsoft actually use it internally in its own organisation? Apparently so, and it has saved the company millions.

A year ago, IBM partnered with Apple to bring iOS devices and applications to the enterprise. The once mortal enemies are now looking to take their relationship to the next level with IBM planning a mass adoption of MacBooks in its own organisation. Is your company looking to follow in IBM's footsteps? We have a few pointers for you.

When IBM opened its first Australian SoftLayer data centre in Melbourne last year, it promised a second Sydney centre would be open by the end of the year. A few months behind schedule, the Sydney site is now live.