More organisations are looking to hire server-based IT staff; but finding employees who can work across both traditional servers and converged infrastructure is increasingly tough.

That is the verdict of analyst firm 451 Research in its latest Voice of the Enterprise study, which finds that for two thirds of the more than 500 firms surveyed, recruiting for roles across both sectors is difficult. A similar number (67%) say the primary driver for more server-related employees is business growth, with 42% citing IT organisational changes as key.

Naturally, the continued interest in staff with specialisms in traditional servers means organisations aren’t quite ready to put all their eggs in the public cloud basket. Concerns continue over the long term costs of using public cloud, with some IT managers polled admitting they are even expanding their on-premises servers and converged infrastructure to support certain requirements.

“Most IT managers are closely scrutinising their deployment options instead of blindly following the pack to IaaS and other off-premises cloud services,” said Christian Perry, research manager and report lead analyst. “When determining the optimal mix of on- and off-premises compute resources, there is no doubt this is hampered by the availability of specialist skills and regional availability.

“Whether organisations will realise their expected server staff expansion remains to be seen due to hiring difficulties,” added Perry.

This said, 451 does agree that the worldwide pool of full time employees dedicated to server administration will decline. It’s a classic catch-22; almost seven in 10 (69%) said current candidates lack skills and experience in this department, while available talent is shrinking due to a lack of candidates by region and high salaries putting employers off.

As this publication has previously reported, if you can find the right role at the right company, then a lucrative opportunity awaits. According to figures from PayScale, AT&T, General Electric and Oracle are the likeliest to pay the most for experienced cloud computing professionals.

You can find out more about the report here (registration required).

SYS-CON Events announced today that WineSOFT will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Based in Seoul and Irvine, WineSOFT is an innovative software house focusing on internet infrastructure solutions. The venture started as a bootstrap start-up in 2010 by focusing on making the internet faster and more powerful. WineSOFT’s knowledge is based on the expertise of TCP/IP, VPN, SSL, peer-to-peer, mobile browser, and live streaming solutions.

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Lurking in the background of any IT manager’s nightmares is the spectre of shadow IT. Shadow IT can be described as hardware or software used in an enterprise that is not supported by the enterprise. The negativity of the term is justified because it implies that employees are using technology without the knowledge or approval of the IT department – a recipe for disaster.

The risks of shadow IT are well-known and have the potential to damage a business’s ability to function effectively. Even so, organisations still need to warn employees about the dangers of using software that is not supported by the business.

In recent years, shadow IT has increased with the use of software by employees who have bypassed company IT rules. With the increasing use of cloud applications such as Slack and online business tools such as Skype to encourage faster and more effective work, the risk of employees using shadow IT have increased. Technology developments such as BYOD (bring your own device), while providing significant benefits and fulfilling a specific business requirement, have also bred the rise of third party providers in the workplace, without the blessing of corporate IT.

The most obvious risk posed by shadow IT is the security lapse it enables. Without the IT department’s knowledge, unapproved applications can quickly lead to security breaches. Software needs to follow the protocols set out by the organisation’s IT department because, without this compliance and oversight, negative consequences begin to arise. For example, sharing or passing data outside the corporate firewall to external users or collaborators, where data governance and compliance can’t be assured presents a clear business threat. In addition, corporate bandwidth can be diminished by data travelling on the network that IT managers are unaware of.

Much of the attraction of unsupported software is that employees find it simple and quick to be productive using such tools. The intent is therefore not malicious because the initial impetus for utilising software that doesn’t conform to company IT policy is the desire to work effectively. However, this ends up being counter-productive and diminishes the employee’s efficiency in the long run because employees are threatening the organisation’s security and compliance status and creating fragmentation in the types of software used by different people within the business.

Negating these risks and eliminating shadow IT requires a close understanding of the business’s challenges and the employee’s needs. Both must go hand-in-hand so employees’ initial motivation to seek out unsupported software is removed because they already have access to approved, attractive to use tools.

This is CTERA’s mission – to provide a platform that offers leading security, governance and authentication tools, to ensure that whatever a user chooses, IT mandates for security, governance and compliance are adhered to. CTERA serves as a central control point to diminish, and eventually eliminate, shadow IT use and increase organisational compliance. 

Even though organisations aspire to implement the tightest security models, if users fail to adopt the technologies that IT sanctions, there can be no security, no governance and no compliance. Businesses need to find the right balance between control and user enablement, and they are seeking solutions that enable them to do so.

Overall, there needs to be greater awareness among organisations that there are alternatives to the OneDrives and Dropboxes that can make users happy while tackling the challenges of keeping organisations protected. There are clear roles for IT departments and for individual users of hardware and software in the workplace. Successful businesses of the future will be those that understand this new reality, and have implemented IT policies that benefit the organisation and allow employees to flourish while working effectively. This will mean providing file sharing, storage and protection tools in a form that users like, that benefits the employer and that allows peace of mind for the IT department.

Given the popularity of the containers, further investment in the telco/cable industry is needed to transition existing VM-based solutions to containerized cloud native deployments. The networking architecture of the solution isolates the network traffic into different network planes (e.g., management, control, and media). This naturally makes support for multiple interfaces in container orchestration engines an indispensable requirement.

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yperConvergence came to market with the objective of being simple, flexible and to help drive down operating expenses. It reduced the footprint by bundling the compute/storage/network into one box. This brought a new set of challenges as the HyperConverged vendors are very focused on their own proprietary building blocks. If you want to scale in a certain way, let’s say you identified a need for more storage and want to add a device that is not sold by the HyperConverged vendor, forget about it. This meant that up to now the HyperConverged vendors were in charge of the requirements.

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SYS-CON Events announced today that App2Cloud will exhibit at SYS-CON’s 21st International Cloud Expo®, which will take place on Oct. 31 – Nov 2, 2017, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
App2Cloud is an online Platform, specializing in migrating legacy applications to any Cloud Providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud).

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Recently, IoT seems emerging as a solution vehicle for data analytics on real-world scenarios from setting a room temperature setting to predicting a component failure of an aircraft. Compared with developing an application or deploying a cloud service, is an IoT solution unique? If so, how? How does a typical IoT solution architecture consist? And what are the essential components and how are they relevant to each other? How does the security play out? What are the best practices in formulating an IoT solution? These are all the topics which this presentation will cover.

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