Want to know what the IT staffing/jobs outlook is for 2010? Well, the good news, according to a new Robert Half Technology report — there’s “more than enough work to go around.” In answer to the question, “How would you describe the staffing level of your IT department in relation to current workloads?,” CIOs responded:
- Very understaffed 10%
- Somewhat understaffed 33%
- At the appropriate staff level 53%
- Somewhat overstaffed 3%
- Don’t know/no answer 1%
The report further found that 7% of CIOs plan to add IT staff in the first quarter of 2010, while 4% expect workforce reductions. (The net 3% increase is the strongest forecast since the first quarter of 2009.)
This CIO Update article cautions that executives are “taking a slow and steady approach to hiring,” however. So what types of IT professionals are they looking to hire? Generalists and specialists it seems.
On one hand, companies are looking for jack-of-all-trades candidates, so these folks can work in many capacities and help with the overall IT workload.
Demand for certain specialties is strong for applications and database developers, network admins and help desk and support staff.
Email as viable form of business communication is approaching its second decade, and it’s now so ubiquitous that email addresses — like your style of hair, clothing and resume — can communicate more about you than you might realize.
Lifehacker.com recently conducted a poll on “email prejudices” and found that among the first 500 respondents, opinions regarding email addresses were surprisingly strong.
Among the major findings: “The username you select is vastly more important than the provider you use. Firstname.lastname@aol.com is preferred to and more respectable than sexkitten2010@aol.com — cutesy, offensive or unprofessional nicknames are big mistakes.”
“Domains are important, especially in technology-related fields,” Lifehacker found. “An AOL address might be just as serviceable as any other address when it comes to sending and receiving mail but to most people in tech fields it says ‘Hi. I’m from 1996. What is this Internet you speak of?’”
Businesses should have their own domain and personalized email, according to Lifehacker. “SomeCompany@sbcglobal.net or SomeDude2049@yahoo.com were huge turn offs to readers and many expressed that they would question the professionalism of a company with such an unpolished image and do business elsewhere.”
You can read more of the poll results here.
The question of security in a cloud-based infrastructure is provoking a clash of technology titans.
Leading advocates of cloud computing, such as Amazon.com, are finding security to be a major stumbling block. At a recent technology conference, Amazon CTO Werner Vogels made the point that cloud services provide greater security for online businesses than what the businesses could develop in-house.
“Being able to use many of these components out of the cloud-computing world will allow you to create a more secure business than what you could do on your own,” he told the audience at the Supernova Conference in San Francisco.
But at the Gartner Symposium in Orlando, HP CEO Mark Hurd said: “We wouldn’t put anything material in nature outside the firewall.”
According to TechRepublic technology editor Bill Detwiler, “Hurd seemed to imply that HP would be willing to use cloud infrastructure within its firewall, but wouldn’t think of putting sensitive data (such as email or financial systems) in an external cloud.” HP obviously sees public versus private-cloud security as critical because it gets more than 1,000 hacks a day.
To test the broader IT community, TechRepublic in December asked its readers: “Do you trust current security measures enough to place ‘material information’ in a cloud outside your firewall?”
At last count, 90 percent of the respondents said no.
Click here to view some of Vogels’ speech and see TechRepublic’s survey results.
Outsourcing of data centers to third parties will see double-digit growth in Europe this year, according to Gartner VP of Research Scott Morrison.
Europe’s drive to outsource is being driven by the age of many company data centers, as well as corporate desire to restructure IT infrastructures and eliminate “data-center sprawl,” he explains in a recent interview with Accela Communications’ IT Briefing Center. Focus of many companies’ outsourcing includes their mission-critical IT services and business-critical applications.
“Many IT leaders make the decision that it’s beyond the scope of the internal IT organization to provide the required level of guarantee back to the business,” he said. “They’re thus drawn to the service-provider model on the basis of the better overall service levels being offered.”
Companies looking to outsource their data centers remain focused on two key metrics: cost reduction and performance improvement, he says.
“While we’ve seen many parts of the network and IT services market start to contract during this economic downturn, demand for third-party data centers is actually growing faster as a result,” Morrison adds. “And Gartner expects to see double-digit rises in demand in Europe this year, continuing the trend we’ve seen in the past three to four years.”
When you look at system downtime, the math is pretty simple, but disturbing. According to recent statistics compiled by International Data Corporation (IDC), each year the average midsize company has between 16 and 20 hours of network, system, or application downtime.
IDC also determined that revenue losses per hour averaged about $70,000. So, these midsize companies are losing about $1.4 million a year in unanticipated downtime.
“Causes of downtime vary, but aging systems can have components or software that fails, while networking links and power grids can fail at any time because of external causes, such as weather, construction work, or natural disaster,” according to IDC. “Outages occurring during business hours result in revenue loss, as orders are dropped, customers move on, and employees cannot access critical applications.”
