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Good news if you’re an IT practitioner or manager, particularly in the US, but not so good if you’re a sysadmin; the latest examination of IT salaries from automation and cloud software provider Puppet has found that more than half of IT bods in the US earn more than $100,000 per year, while manager salaries have gone ‘off the chart’.

The latest DevOps salary report, which garnered responses from more than 4,600 IT professionals, argues that the percentage of US managers earning more than $150,000 went up to 43% in 2016, from 26% last year, while 34% of sysadmins earn more than $100,000 – lower on average than other common IT practitioner jobs. The number of IT practitioners earning more than $100,000 has gone up to 58% from 47% over the past 12 months.

IT practitioners earn more in the US than in Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with the most common salary range in the US being $100,000 to $125,000 compared to a lower bracket for the latter three countries.

The research also found that the more servers IT teams manage, the more money you’re likely to earn. The cut-off point appears to be 5,000 servers; those who manage more are on average earning between $100,000 and $125,000, while those who manage less are more likely to be on $75,000 to $100,000.

Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet, argued that the survey results reveal the need to hire the best talent. “Today, software is everywhere and is the driver of every business. For organisations to compete in this new world, they need to enable a frictionless delivery of high quality software,” said Kersten.

“This year’s DevOps salary report shows that organisations are realising the pressures of these dynamics and are pushing to hire, retain and manage the best IT teams to gain a strong competitive advantage,” he added.

Previous research has shown the issues associated with tech skills – and how much they cost organisations. A study from Indeed.com earlier this year found that DevOps engineer was the hardest IT job to fill in North America, while the latest State of the Cloud report from RightScale found that DevOps and Docker skill sets continue to rise.

SYS-CON Events announced today Telecom Reseller has been named “Media Sponsor” of SYS-CON’s 19th International Cloud Expo, which will take place on November 1–3, 2016, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Telecom Reseller reports on Unified Communications, UCaaS, BPaaS for enterprise and SMBs. They report extensively on both customer premises based solutions such as IP-PBX as well as cloud based and hosted platforms.

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StarNet Communications Corp has announced the addition of three Secure Remote Desktop modules to its flagship X-Win32 PC X server. The new modules enable X-Win32 to safely tunnel the remote desktops from Linux and Unix servers to the user’s PC over encrypted SSH.
Traditionally, users of PC X servers deploy the XDMCP protocol to display remote desktop environments such as the Gnome and KDE desktops on Linux servers and the CDE environment on Solaris Unix machines. XDMCP is used primarily on company Local Area Networks as it is a both unsecure and does not work over the Internet.

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The vast majority of enterprises plan to migrate more workloads to the cloud in 2016. But IT teams may not be prepared to maintain cloud resources, a new survey by Logicworks finds.

According to the report, nearly half of IT decision makers believe their organisation’s IT workforce is not completely prepared to address the challenges of managing their cloud resources over the next five years. As cloud adoption grows, this can have serious impacts on the long-term success of cloud in the enterprise.

Underestimating cloud management

A cloud platform like Amazon Web Services simplifies infrastructure management by providing resources that can be spun up in seconds — plus built-in tools to facilitate common maintenance tasks.

However, many organizations mistake “simplified” infrastructure maintenance for “little to no” infrastructure maintenance; in other words, they think maintaining their cloud systems will be easy. And when leadership thinks of the cloud as easy, IT teams suffer.

Infact, the survey found that 80% of IT decision makers feel that leadership underestimates the cost and effort of managing cloud systems. And because they underestimate cloud management, they do not effectively plan for the staffing and resources IT requires to achieve highly available, scalable cloud systems.

The reality is that a resource like Amazon EC2 is just a virtual server — you still need to manage backups, upgrades, patches, etc. You still need to monitor it, and if it goes down at 3am, your team needs to bring it back up. Platforms like Microsoft Azure and AWS have introduced tools to make these tasks easier, but they have not eliminated these tasks entirely. This is also true to some extent with “plug and play” SaaS platforms; someone still needs to manage access, configure reports, integrate the tool with existing workflows, etc.

Increased pressure on IT

When you combine lack of cloud management planning, lack of cloud expertise, and the increasing pressure to deliver infrastructure faster and more reliably, you can see why IT teams are struggling to keep up.

These pressures sometimes cause cloud projects to falter and stagnate after the first wave of migration. The company usually gets some cost benefits from migrating, but does not get the agility benefits they expected.

The easy answer to cloud agility and cost concerns is automation and continuous delivery; in other words, use experienced cloud engineers to automate common maintenance tasks. Unfortunately, the same survey found that the majority of respondents (54%) think it is extremely difficult to find good DevOps talent; and they cited lack of expertise as a top reason why they cannot automate their cloud deployments further.

Anecdotally, the team at Logicworks has encountered dozens of mid-sized companies with similar challenges. They have one or two projects in the cloud, but have realised that cloud migration is not the hard part — cloud management is. And they do not have operational maturity on cloud platforms to transition existing processes (runbooks, incident response plans, change management processes) to the cloud. For many, supplementing their internal team with external experts is the answer.

The post IT is Unprepared for Cloud Management, Survey Finds appeared first on Logicworks Gathering Clouds.

In today’s digital economy, companies are faced with a fast data challenge as well as a Big Data one. As a result they are under pressure to adapt their analytics processes and data flows at pace to move beyond traditional data warehouse silos.
Big Data projects are either too big or too complex to handle the traditional way. That’s why most projects by companies at the start of their Big Data initiative have no process at all. Waterfall approaches are notably inefficient as you probably won’t have access to proper staging environment and only limited time and scale for qualification.

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One of the many questions that companies face when introducing new enterprise systems either to provide new functionality or incorporate legacy systems from a merger or acquisition is “How do we identify and manage access rights?”
Not only do new access approval processes need to be established, but a common platform to define and execute processes, reliably document approvals and provide users with an acceptable user experience is often not in place to handle the additional workload. Corporate IT is also faced with the challenge responding quickly to changes in access rules or approval chains.

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The following fictional case study is a composite of actual horror stories I’ve heard over the years. Unfortunately, this scenario often occurs when in-house integration teams take on the complexities of DevOps and ALM integration with an enterprise service bus (ESB) or custom integration. It is written from the perspective of an enterprise architect tasked with leading an organization’s effort to adopt Agile to become more competitive. The company has turned to Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) as a way of scaling Agile, since initial attempts at Agile were not successful despite many scrum master training sessions.
I’m told that our SAFe implementation depends on the flow of information between people from different parts of the organization. Because these groups all use different tools, we need to focus on integrating them.

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