SolarWinds new study, entitled Trends Report 2019: Skills for Tech Pros of Tomorrow is based on a survey fielded in December 2018, which yielded responses from 100 practitioners, managers, and directors in the UK from public-and private-sector small, mid-size, and enterprise companies.

SolarWinds findings

Their annual report, which examines the state of skills and career development for technology professionals, reveals that they only have one foot grounded in today’s hybrid IT realities while also setting their sights on new technologies.

Specifically, tech professionals in DevOps, have prioritised skills in systems and infrastructure management, security management, and hybrid IT deployment and management over the last 12 months.

However, in the next three years, these professionals plan to improve their skills in security management and hybrid IT, while eyeing careers paths in areas like data science and analytics.

According to SolarWinds study, 70% of UK tech professionals need to develop their skill in order to confidently manage environments by 2024, but nearly 80% said they lack the time, training, and funding, the report said.

Risks of performance

This stark reality ultimately put businesses at risk of performance and competitive advantage losses, making it important for DevOps teams, developers, and WPMs, to develop their skills and careers in the next couple of years.

“Recent history has proven that there is a direct correlation between technology and business performance,” said Joe Kim, executive vice president, and global chief technology officer, SolarWinds.

“The results of this year’s IT Trends Report highlight that businesses need to focus even more on developing these professionals charged with running and pioneering technologies for the businesses. By removing day-to-day barriers, arming technology pros with the right technology and management tools, and prioritising skills and career development in the IT budget, tech pros can be better equipped for the future and help with business growth.”

“The findings are also in line with our view that the most critical problem we need to help tech pros solve today is the reality of the hybrid IT landscape—this applies to all tech pros whether on-premises, managing hybrid infrastructures, SaaS-based, or MSPs,” added Kim.

“The way SolarWinds has always addressed and will continue to address these realities is through our deep connection to tech pros across the IT infrastructure. We are committed to understanding the needs of our customers and making their jobs easier as business technology continues to evolve.”

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According to The Path to MSSP report, 17% of companies intend to switch their current service provider in the next year, 10% want to cease outsourcing in favour of in-house management, and 49% plan to outsource their security for the first time.

The report revealed the five types of IT security opportunities over the next year:

• 25% of the market are currently handling security internally but now want to outsource their security primarily due to cost
• 24% of the market are currently handling security internally but now want to outsource it to improve performance
• 10% of the market are currently outsourcing but considering taking security back in-house in the next 12 months
• 9% of the market are considering switching service providers due to poor performance
• 8% of the market are considering changing providers to reduce costs

Tim Brown, vice president of security architecture at SolarWinds MSP, announced: “Every day brings news of a new security hole that needs to be patched, a massive data breach, or a new strain of ransomware that businesses need to watch out for.

“Understandably, this creates nervousness amongst enterprises and SMEs and greater scrutiny of the IT security measures in place.

“Where there is market turbulence, there is also the opportunity, and the good news for IT service providers is that this has resulted in almost half of all businesses planning to outsource their security needs to specialists.

“However, IT service providers need to remember that more opportunity inherently means more competition.

“Providers need to be able to prove their knowledge, capabilities, and available resources to take full advantage.”

The report examined the views of more than 400 SMEs and enterprises in the US and UK.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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The global leader in delivering comprehensive, scalable IT service management solutions to IT solution providers and MSPs has created the threat detection system to continuously update over two million domains in over 85 countries.

The Mail Assure spam and threat protection also helps to effectively shield users from email threats; to act as a failsafe if a company’s primary email service goes down.

The solution provides business continuity and user access to email flow. Mail Assure also allows users to:

• Integrate with virtually any on-premises or cloud-based email service, including Microsoft Office 365 and Exchange
• Brand the solution with company logo and interface colour scheme
• Specify the location of servers within North America or Europe for regulatory compliancy
• Use any web-connected device with responsive UI design
• View comprehensive, detailed mail logs and reports
• Search indexed archives for copying and compression of all inbound and outbound emails
• Import existing archive data and export searched data to normal formats

Greg Lissy, vice president of product management at SolarWinds MSP, said: “The most vulnerable vector for malicious business attacks is email.

“According to recent research, 91% of cyber attacks and the resulting data breach begin with a spear phishing email. In this high-threat world, it’s more important than ever for IT service providers to provide a reliable and stable mail protection solution that offers spam filtering and seamless integration at an affordable price.

“Even if customers have a primary layer of security, as with Microsoft Office 365, Mail Assure provides an additional layer of defence to prevent spam, virus, and ransomware attacks-providing users with increased reliability, email continuity, and top-of-the-line email security.”

Written from press release by Leah Alger

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Businesses can only progress and perform as quickly as IT enables them to, and, these days, technology is a major point of differentiation for any type of company.

In response, as a growing number of organisations look to increase agility and performance in the IT department, one movement is changing the way two teams have traditionally collaborated: DevOps.

But despite being one of the industry buzzwords of the year, there exists substantial confusion over what DevOps means and how organisations can take advantage of the movement.

Are all companies in need of DevOps?

Not every company. But every IT department can benefit from a DevOps mentality.

Who requires DevOps, in your opinion?

Proper DevOps is useful for development teams that want agility. Some companies don’t develop software, and even some development teams that maintain existing, stable software might find that the investment in time, processes, tools, and energy required to adopt DevOps is higher than the benefits they will see.

However, every IT department can benefit from the principles that are part of DevOps. These principles are almost like a prerequisite to adopt DevOps: a focus on end-user experience, collaboration, performance orientation, service orientation, automation, and monitoring.

What does the culture of DevOps provide?

There’s no doubt that the concept of DevOps is picking up steam and making its way into the traditional on-premises IT department. And although the transition to a DevOps environment does not take place overnight, and there are significant challenges to be aware of before beginning a transition, by leveraging these principles, businesses can be well on their way to reaping the benefits of an integrated DevOps mentality.

Ultimately, despite being a bit of a difficult term to define, DevOps, a positive organisational movement that will help businesses empower IT departments to innovate, has the potential to change traditional data centres as we know it.
DevOps has the potential to improve agility, deliver innovation faster, provide higher quality software, better align work and value, and give the ability to respond to problems or changes.

DevOps has the potential to improve agility, deliver innovation faster, provide higher quality software, better align work and value, and give the ability to respond to problems or changes.

What tools do you need to make DevOps a success?

Organisations continue to perceive DevOps as a specific role or set of tools usually exclusive to cloud deployments, rather than a mentality. At its core, DevOps is simply a modern approach to software development. It aims to dissolve the siloes between the development and operations teams and encourage shared accountabilities and processes in order to better understand software performance.

However, some of the principles require new tools. The focus on automation and agility usually means a team should adopt configuration management and automated deployment tools. Similarly, the orientation toward performance and the need to understand the impact of every change requires adopting monitoring as a core discipline.

What team is required in order to undergo a DevOps transition?

Typically, when software is developed, one team will write the code, another team tests it, and yet another team deploys or runs the software, all of which translates to not only conflict between these teams, but also a much longer update cycle for any piece of software. In a DevOps environment, developers share responsibility for testing and operations, everyone is accountable for performance, and tools and goals are shared.

The team is able to manage changes to software more quickly, and in smaller pieces, ultimately resulting in a more efficient, effective and agile IT department with greater quality assurance for the end-user.

Still, for all its benefits, DevOps does have its challenges. Notably, the upheaval a traditional data centre will undergo to support a DevOps-centric environment can be potentially detrimental to an organisation.

Foremost, finding IT professionals with the right skills is extremely difficult. CIOs and other business decision makers may remember a similar experience several years ago when cloud computing exploded into the data centre: IT pros with suitable cloud experience were few and far between. In the absence of hiring a DevOps expert, organisations must instead invest in training their existing teams, experiment, and feel their way through a newly deployed DevOps environment.

The good news is that most organisations are willing to share their own best practices; the bad news is that most development teams are already understaffed. As a result, there is very little time for admins to think about, build, test, optimise, and implement all the changes that are required to successfully move to a DevOps process.

That includes not only taking the time to learn about the process, but also deciding how to realign existing processes and skills to fit a new DevOps model. And one should not underestimate the required change in culture to adopt the new mindset, either.

In short, adopting DevOps usually requires a team with a more collaborative spirit, higher focus on performance and end-user monitoring, and a systems approach that focuses on agility and optimisation, rather than a tactical or reactive perspective that focuses on fixing what is broken.

Edited for web by Jordan Platt.

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