Through history many things have found that clouds are a useful entity. Goku from Dragon Ball, Lakitu the Koopa and the AngelSoft baby all make use of the fluffy pillows of frozen water. Of course I’m not talking about salting the atmosphere with your servers. I speak of the metaphorical internet cloud. Though the cloud certainly does have it’s downsides it is also a cottony soft realm of possibilities. Ok, no more analogies, I promise.

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IT professionals have always had to grit their teeth and deal with end users’ sometimes unrealistic expectations, but as the cloud rolls in their frustrations may only increase. Employees now have access to fantastic technologies in their private lives and they expect these technologies to be made available to them professionally. Vanson Bourne polled 520 CIOs (in a survery available here)from around the world to better understand how they felt about the impending issue. 77% of respondants feel that this trend of BYOT (bring your own tech) will lead to great business risks as employees will attempt to utilize their private technologies without IT involvment and the information security they provide, a trend that 64% of polled CIOs say is already occuring.

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Everybody in the business world knows that outsourcing can be a very touchy subject, so I just want to go over some of the issues that make it so controversial.

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Technology is at the forefront of any business. Even small businesses can no longer ignore the importance of their web and social media presences, as well as the technology available to them for inventory, supply chain, and human resource management. Regardless of the long term goals of a given business, technology is almost assuredly a part of its present and future plans. Thus, as IT Managers, the issue of maintaining demands of the present and looking for ways to handle future issues began to pull at your resources in opposite directions. How should we balance these distinct demands?

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After multiple assessments have ended in various experts claiming that Google+ was dead, it might be time to ignore them.

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Here in the development world, many, if not most of us developers are never quite satisfied with where we are in our careers. As we work more and more, we get better at what we do, and as your knowledge and abilities grow, you should get paid more, right? Well, apparently this is what a lot employees think, and the don’t see these ideals becoming realities with their current employers, so they are leaving. A huge percentage of It professionals believe that they would be required to leave their current companies in order to advance their careers any more. This is definitely a serious issue for employers, as it is a hard hit to a company’s productivity when an employee leaves, and it is generally not cheap to replace them.
So, how do we try to resolve this issue? Here are a few ways:

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It is hard to keep track of everything that may be going on with company-provided mobile devices, but there are viable options emerging.

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Sugar. Spice. And everything nice… These were the ingredients chosen for creating the perfect… wait, that’s for Powerpuff Girls. The ingredients for the perfect IT techs are tasks, recognition, and reward, and then spill in some Chemical X, also known as expectation.

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From antiquity to the postmodern age, the human mind has been on a continuous journey into the unknown. Profound technologies once thought of only in SciFi films like flexible and stretchable OLED screens and programmed viruses that target cancer cells are being successfully tested now. Virtualization, like the grid in TRON, is a tangible glimpse of what the future has in store, but remains an unknown for many IT departments. VMware’s ESX Server offers weilds benefit and is straightforward to use.

There are many virtualization utilities available, but my experience with ESX has been very positive. The only oddity is that it also flies by the name of vSphere. So, when going to download or get support for ESX one has to look under vSphere Hypervisor. I say ESX, but really it is ESXi. Previously, all the administrative utilities were built outside the kernel which takes more space. ESXi places it all inside the kernel which is not only smaller, but provides better security.

Here’s where ESXi is like “the grid”: it takes reality into the virtual dimension. That is, it takes physical servers and makes them virtual. Not only can they be turned off and on but they can each be assigned their own IP address. The benefit of virtual servers over real ones is that you can flex the hardware as needed, or even just delete the virtual server if it isn’t needed. This is a dream for anyone in IT.

Whether consolidating already existing servers or looking to do testing or trying out new software, virtual servers is the way to go. VMware provides a tool called the vCenter Converter that takes physical machines and creates virtual ones from them. This is a hit or a miss. You can either boot to a CD or install it on the OS, but the errors come when there are incompatible drivers and the like. Whether its VMware, KVM, or what have you, venture into the unknown and get on the grid.

One of the most common issues in management is handling responsibility. eNotes states that responsibility is “the obligation to accomplish the goals related to the position and the organization.” The role that managers play in responsibility goes a step further: they are liable for their own responsibilities as well as the responsibilities of their workers. How does one handle their own obligations as well as the obligations of their workers? Influence.

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