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01.22.08
Surviving The Death Of Corporate IT Departments
 By
Dan Morrill
If you have never heard of Nicholas Carr, make it a point today to go visit his blog, and go to Amazon to purchase his books.
His thoughts on the death of the IT department have serious ramifications for corporate security, and is something to pay attention to, because all your managers and senior executives will be reading the same things.
The hardest part is surviving the death of corporate IT departments, and reinventing information security. Something that is long overdue, we need to reinvent our industry to be more relevant, more engaged, and more collaborative to survive the next 10 years.
If we look at the end game - a decade or two down the road for big companies; sooner for smaller ones - it's hard to imagine that the "IT department" as we've come to know it will still exist. Many of the information-management and process-design skills currently housed in IT departments will continue to be of great value to companies, of course, but they will likely have been absorbed into business units and other departments instead of being isolated in a technically focused corporate function. Nicholas Carr Rough Type
Here is why I agree with him; more and more business units are bypassing traditional IT Departments to get closer to purchasers at all levels. While I personally think that storing corporate data off an internal corporate network is generally a bad idea, many do not, as a cost cutting measure, or leveraging the security and data center technology of a provider.
More and more business needs are driving the IT Department as it should be in many respects, but as a small startup, using Amazon S3 or other comparable services removes not only cost structures, but also leverages the IT and Security departments of the larger company. This saves untold dollars for a startup, and basically turns computing into a commodity. The idea of commodity computing can be seen by various examples in history as electricity was originally only for the well funded; electricity soon became a cornerstone of what society needed to survive. The same thing is happening in cloud computing concepts, who needs an IT department or a security department when a company can leverage cloud computing? Even the PC follows this kind of trending history.
The other problem is bringing in new talent who can actually do work, while hiring standards vary from company to company, it is difficult to find a good security engineer for under 80K, if a company can leverage the security department of Amazon, then that is 80K + 33% overhead that is suddenly saved, with no major drop offs in capability or support, other than an annoying telephone call, which the end user is likely to get anyways. These are realistic savings, and as we near recession, this is something that corporate managers are going to be looking at to save money. Like it or hate it, this is a very realistic scenario, and as the economy slows, people lost to layoffs will more likely than not move on, meaning no replacements in the pipeline as the economy improves in 3 to 4 years from now. The only real choice might be to leverage the cloud computing structure and rely on bigger companies infosec departments.
Things to think about, and well worth picking up Nicholas's books and reading his blog.
Comments
About
the Author:
Dan Morrill has been in the information security field for 18 years, both
civilian and military, and is currently working on his Doctor of Management.
Dan shares his insights on the important security issues of today through
his blog, Managing
Intellectual Property & IT Security, and is an active participant in the
ITtoolbox blogging community.
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