A global survey of enterprise security by Symantec found that 75% of organisations have have suffered data breaches within the past 12 months and losses are averaging $US2 million annually. The figure was even higher in Australia/New Zealand, where 89 percent of those surveyed experienced attacks on their IT infrastructure in the past 12 months.

SharePoint’s rapid installation across organisations (and especially within the public sector) is leading to fragmented deployment, which is then causing difficulties when attempting to merge or share content and applications. Organisations that are part of a federation, such as Local and State Councils – can alleviate future integration bottlenecks, reduce investments in application development, increase the rate of eServices delivery and help ensure that stakeholders can share information, by adopting the governance practices from the open source community.