Archived CEO Blogs

When it comes to choosing a firm to help with your IT staffing efforts, it’s important to remember that some IT staffing firms do a better job than others. Here’s what you have a right to expect:

1. An IT staffing company should be able to help you strategically plan your IT hiring
This involves a thorough examination of budget priorities, workloads, the skillsets of current team members, and future projects — all with an eye on flexibly meeting both your short- and long-term goals. Look for an IT staffing company that helps you determine what types of special skills you need for your IT projects, the best mix of permanent IT staff and contractors, when you’ll see workload spikes, etc.

According to Computer Economics’ 2014/2015 IT Spending & Staffing Benchmarks report, hiring of IT professionals is finally on the upswing — yet another indication that our long-declining economy continues to improve.

Even so, you may not have an easy time finding the right IT expertise when you need it. That’s because there’s something of a squeeze going on (you know, the one that puts you between a rock and a hard place):

In my last post I focused on the first two steps in planning for a hybrid cloud: Making sure your IT infrastructure is “cloudified” and assessing your current environment and workloads. In this post, I’ll lay out the final four steps: 

By some accounts, better than 50% of organizations are now deploying hybrid clouds — and for some very good reasons:

Improved security, because sensitive data can remain behind your private cloud firewall while less sensitive data can be permitted onto a public cloud.
Ability to specify where and under what terms and conditions your data is stored.
Effective workload balancing without breaking the bank, since using a public cloud to, say, handle peak loads can be far cheaper than keeping everything in-house or moving everything to a public cloud.

To get a hybrid cloud up and running , you need to begin with planning — specifically, a six-step planning process that, fortunately, you do not have to undertake alone. In this post, I’ll focus on the first two steps:

Most security experts — including ours at Quest — will tell you that it’s no longer a question of if attempts to compromise your data, apps, and/or technology infrastructure will happen, it’s now only a question of when.

So what can you do to protect your business in this age when it’s so tough to distinguish between trusted and threatening network traffic, when there’s no longer such a thing as a secure perimeter around your data, when the “attack surface” has never been greater?

Imagine discovering that for the last 12 months none of your company data had been backed up at your designated co-lo.

Worse, you only found this out because your corporate site has suffered a catastrophic failure. All your data has been lost — and you have no way to retrieve it.

You’re outraged, of course, and you want answers. How could your co-lo provider fail to back up your data? What about your provider’s vaunted disaster recovery service? Who is responsible for allowing this to happen?