At this point, I think we can all agree that technology has an important place in business. It’s replaced battalions of filing cabinets with a bit of space on a database server, removed the cost of flying across country with that of a web cam, and enabled us to present ourselves to customers without shouting at them from cheesy 3 am infomercials while wearing a clown nose and holding a duck. But all of these fantastical abilities have one requirement: You need people who know how to deal with them. The problem is that technology moves so fast it creates a significant gap between the skills of those we hire and the state of technology today. CompTIA, provider of professional IT certifications, has made this the subject of a recent study: State of the IT Skills Gap. (more…)

Long gone are the days when an employees first days involve teaching them how to use a computer. Everyone knows how to use a mouse and keyboard, and the number of people who turn off the monitor when instructed to reboot the computer are dwindling. New employees are now familiar with the internet and the ins and outs of common operating systems. This newer generation of tech savvy has been given a moniker: The Digital Native. (more…)

Okay, so that’s not entirely true but it got your attention, didn’t it. With the infamy of groups like Anonymous, so called hacktivists, grows, so does the likelihood that your company will be hit by their weapon of choice: the DDoS. While distributed denial of service attacks are nothing new, 2011 was truly the year of the DDoS. After Anonymous undertook operation payback in December of 2010, against allies of the US in response to the Wikileaks scandal, DDoS attacks are like the new meaningless petition. The difference is that the meaningless petition didn’t really affect anybody. A well executed DDoS can bring any infrastructure to it’s knees. Unless they’re ready. (more…)

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. (more…)

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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