The IT Security job market (posted esp. for Troy that said the other day that my blog was stale!)
I just received my annual 2003 Salary and Employment guide from Kforce and I thought I would share something I found interesting in the report. It says "Security - Gartner analysts predict $288 Billion on online revenues by 2006, up from $72 billion in 2001 - and, as with all online functions, security is a priority. Beginning in late 2003 companies will be recruiting security professionals much more aggressively. Even as the average IT job pay declined nearly 6% (OUCH!--and thank you very much) in the past 12 months, IT security pay is up by 23% (except for Utah State Government jobs--sorry Troy) from the first quarter of 2001. Security pay is expected to continue to outperform the market.

As of now, it's easier to get into the information security field if you're already working in IT, although employers may soon look to colleges that offer information security degrees that blend information security, communications, and psychology."
2:27:51 PM     comment []

Competence and predicting technology trends
Ok so I have been thinking a lot since Jim wrote about competence a few weeks ago. I got feeling bad because it has been a while since I have been the soothsayer or blue sky guy that I used to be. Then I read Pete's entry today about becoming stupid as you get more on your plate. Having the time to play with and think about technology is an important thing if you wish to have even a slight chance at predicting technology trends. I have always tried to at least once a week experience something new in technology or explore a feature that I haven't before with my computer or network. For years I have set aside a few min. or hours on Friday's to do just that. Generally it used to be a day to backup the computer and search for new patches to the OS or to often used applications. Phil Windley mentioned Mosaic the original web browser and it brought back memories of almost weekly beta updates to the program (you could get the nightly builds if you really wanted to, but I stuck to the "stable" releases). It was so cool when a new release came out that either added a new feature, or more often corrected that bug that was making Mosaic crash whenever you ran x application or did x or went to x website. Now the internet and the web is not nearly as interesting as it used to be. Just making the web work in the early days (summer and fall of 1994) was interesting enough, and the content that was on the web was more geared to what I was interested in. Now it is clogged with pop-up and banner ads and other commercial activity. The reason I chose Friday was that at the time I was constantly working with vendors to implement projects and I relied heavily on my sales representatives. As many of you know it is next to imposible (or used to be) to get a hold of anyone in sales on a Friday (esp. in the Summer). Maybe that is why I am now a little incompetent in the technology trends area as I am out on the links with the sales people now and back then I was just one of those "technical people" now I am one of those "stupid managers".

Ok so enough reminiscing. What I really wanted to talk about are the biggie technology trends right now and what I think will be important in the coming couple years.

Security - by far I beleve that security will be the largest growth area in the industry. Plenty of opportunities in this area now and in the future and lots of work to do to make the interenet a safe place. This is an obvious one and several of my fellow bloggers have written about this recently. I have another post about security jobs and outlook that I will post on this as well.

One trend I HOPE to see in network security would be ease of use and security getting out of my way of my doing my job. Right now we are band aiding bad code by putting up firewalls, VPNs, ACLs and the like. What companies need to do is write better and more secure code and system administrators need to better understand their systems and only open services that they need to. I realize that is a idealistic view of the IT world. But some day before I kill over I would like to see an IT environment where systems and software are written properly and tested for these things before they are released rather than after.

Peer-to-peer - Pete recently wrote about this, so you can read his blog about the technology and applications that exist now that are leveraging peer-to-peer technology. Peer-to-peer will fuel almost all advancements in communication, collaboration, cooperation etc. on computer networks going into the future. I don?t see another core technology that has the potential that peer-to-peer has. There are tons of challenges with peer-to-peer; major upswings on needed bandwidth, security (mentioned earlier), copy write issues etc. But remember we all had the same problems with just about every other IT and Internet technology that came before. New technologies tend to be adopted for recreational and home use before they come into the office, just as Pete mentioned about IM. Apple has introduced Rendezvous which takes peer-to-peer to an interesting level. If you were to marry Rendezvous with a peer-to-peer application like Grove you could create a system where ad hoc collaboration could happen with minimal user setup within a local network via. Wireless (802.1x or BlueTooth). As soon as you walked into a room with others your PDA, Laptop, Phone etc. could communicate and connect with all the other devices in the room to share ideas, documentation, contacts etc.

Apple - ok so I admit I am a Apple zealot. I used to be a Apple bigot, but now I am just an avid fan. What you need to watch with Apple is what they come up with. Apple will most likely not be the company that makes the most or sells the most of an idea they come up with, but everyone else will copy everything they do. The most impressive things about Apple right now are OS X and OS X server. Rock solid TRUE Unix based Operating Systems that are incredibly easy to use out of the box (for us stupid managers), but they can be highly customized as well and you get a command prompt so you can feel like and look like a true geek when you want to. My current favorite Apple software product is OS X server 10.2.3. It comes with everything you need in a internet and file print server. Supports all the open directories and then some, supports all mainstream clients (Mac, Windows, UNIX, Linux etc.), comes with web, FTP, Mail, DNS, Web servers, print server, file sharing for just about everything, PHP, Ruby the list goes on and on. The blog you are reading now is served from an old Mac G3 running OS X server. My other HOPE is that Apple gets a little smarter and can sell more OS X server. I think they can give SUN a run for their money in the internet server business. Too bad that it only runs on Apple hardware (but that is why it is so reliable). Darwin is available for x86 computers so hopefully we will see some good things in the future from that open source project.
2:09:47 PM     comment []