CEO Blogs

By some reports, hiring (and keeping) competent information technology talent has never been so difficult.

To an extent, technology talent struggles vary in degree according to industry subsector and location. Cybersecurity, for instance, faces particularly intense shortages of much-needed experts. Some expect one million cybersecurity job openings this year, and even demand for entry-level cybersecurity slots, like information security analysts, is projected to climb by 37% over the next six years.

In my last post, I advised that a technology consulting services provider should offer a range of capabilities that encompasses integrated managed services , cloud services , and assessments as well as an extensive professional services portfolio emphasizing technology customization and solid technical staffing .

Such technology consulting depth means your provider can help you in many ways, including:

For a long time, the most effective way for an organization to benefit from the power of IT required committing to a single vendor’s technology ecosystem.

You bought or leased the designated hardware on which you ran the designated software and, perhaps, a compatible service or two. But when you inevitably bumped into the limits of your chosen technology ecosystem, you faced a stark choice:

Either give up on that capability you were hoping to implement in the manner that would serve your business best — or alter the way your business operated in order to “sort of” get at least some of what you needed from the technology ecosystem in which you’d already invested plenty.

Typically, technology customization stayed out of reach and businesses were cornered into the second option, forced to adapt to the technology tools available rather than the other way around. Certainly, the ecosystem vendors didn’t mind, as customer lock-in proved extremely profitable.

These days, two-thirds of all applications rely on open-source components. While open source has many virtues, it also has a key vice: once an open source component is integrated into an application, that app inherits any vulnerabilities it contains.

Further, whenever that application is referenced by other software, the inheritance of the initial vulnerability persists. The 2014 Heartbleed bug occurred in this way, and some version of this issue is likely to keep happening because most vendors don’t list all the third-party components their software relies on.

Ensuring data security can be tough, since attacks and breaches and plain old mistakes have so many sources. Often the real cause of a technology risk is deeply buried. Consider this example :