IT in 2009

Every new year brings the promise of new opportunities and challenges. For IT professionals, in particular, predictions indicate that 2009 will be a year of hard work and creative adaptation. Learning new technologies, handling deployments more rapidly, and stopping security threats dominate the outlook.

According to Baseline, energy, economic, and employment issues will be the foundation for most IT activities in the coming year. More businesses are turning to green computing, which is expected to drive economic investments and generate business growth despite the poor economy. As a result, employment should remain steady, although not necessarily providing the lifetime positions some people have grown used to. Instead, entrepreneurial freelancers could be poised to provide IT with its greatest wealth of talent.

Watch for consolidation, shared services, virtualization, and identity and access management to be big in 2009. IT priorities in 2009 include deployments and innovation that drive long-term cost savings.

Virtualization in the cloud

The initial breakthrough of virtualization in January 2008 was exciting, but largely undefined in terms of how it could benefit the corporate world. As more and more IT pros began exploring its possibilities, however, cloud computing became a viable option for more and more businesses. This year, look for "virtualization in the cloud" to become hot. Because virtualization and cloud computing both offer considerable flexibility in the way applications, services and resources are shared and circulated, the combination represents the potential for a decisive break from the commonplace silo-style architecture.

Security

For every computer, there's a virus, worm, or hacker looking for access to it. Even though software developers are becoming more skilled at limiting vulnerabilities and reducing the number of attacks, the severity of attacks appears to be increasing. IT pros skilled in Layer 7 technologies can be of particular help to businesses integrating Web services.

Videoconferencing

As a technology, videoconferencing has come a long way since the early 1990s. Even as more organizations turn to Internet collaboration solutions, the need for visual human interaction still exists. Combine that need with advances in visual solutions such as 720p HD videoconferencing and you have an IT field ripe with possibility. Wainhouse Research says that visual collaboration investments remain steady despite the economic downturn, largely due to savings in travel costs and the ability to improve decisions through visual interaction.

For the expert help you need to position your organization for future growth, please contact Vinay Singh directly at (201) 537-0032 or by email at vinay@theconnorsgroup.com.