Was it Dickens or Emeril who said that sauce for the goose was also sauce for the gander? No matter. We like to dish it out here at Byte and Switch, but we like to think we can take it too. Check out our message boards if you think we dont get a little self-effacing from time to time.
So when we recently dusted off a series of predictions we made about this time last year, we found that our batting average -- even at .500, which ain't bad for baseball -- was pretty crummy if we entertained any notion of moonlighting on the Psychic Friends Network. (See 2005: The B&S Report Card.)
But our annual report card doesnt tell the whole story. Sad to say, we missed a few technologies or market dynamics that we couldnt have foreseen 12 months ago when we gazed deeply into the crystal LUN.
We havent exactly ignored security, but we must confess we were taken aback at just how big a deal it became over the course of the year. This was fueled in large part by a series of damning and damaging headlines about data losses that ran the gamut from spotty courier services to outright negligence. (See Financial Security: Priceless, Don't Be a Data Privacy Dunce, and IT Managers Sweat Security.) It seemed like every backup vendor out there wasted little time piling on Iron Mountain, and forgetting a central tenet of marketing karma: There but for the grace of god go thee and thee and thee.
Safe to say that encryption and other measures to protect data at rest will continue to proliferate in the next several months, but with any luck, backup tapes and maxed-out hard drives will stop disappearing into thin air.
By combining resources and expertise, the AI-Enabled ICT Workforce Consortium will offer a blueprint for how industries can adapt to an AI-dominated future.
IT leaders should heed the guidance of cybersecurity insurance providers who think businesses should prioritize security education, incident preparedness, regular internal audits, and ongoing vulnerability scanning and patching.
There are many network courses that can address your present job's priorities and help you gain the needed skills to keep pace with industry changes and new technologies.
