During challenging economic times, it becomes easy to overlook the things that bring us some measure of joy and comfort. That’s especially true when IT budgets are tight and companies are asking their IT staffs to do a lot more with less.
At the same time, the last year has seen broader adoption of a raft of IT technologies without which things in the land of IT would be decidedly worse than they currently are. Those notable technologies include everything from virtualization management tools and private cloud computing platforms to emerging in-memory computing and business rules management technologies.
What should unify all these technologies in the minds of IT professionals this Thanksgiving is that there is no shortage of demand for people who have skills in these areas, which is something that IT folks should be especially thankful for in these challenging times.
Of course, the real challenge facing the IT industry as a whole is figuring out how to get more people trained in these and other emerging technology sectors that show as much promise. The sooner that happens, the more people there will be that are gainfully employed in a job that pays a decent salary.
While not everyone always appreciates the fact that working in IT generally means having to reinvent one’s self every five years or so in order to stay current on the latest technology, the best thing about IT is that it presents the opportunity to do that. By comparison, other fields simply don’t have the same pace of innovation to allow that to happen.
So please check out this year’s list of IT things to be thankful for, because, chances are, you’ll be working more closely with one or more of these technologies in 2012.
Click through for 10 things to be thankful for this year.
There’s no silver bullet when it comes to security, but next-generation firewalls are a major addition to any IT organizations defense systems.
An increase in productivity that provides the justification for upgrading networks that are starved for bandwidth.
Smartphones and tablets are a pain to manage, but they make enterprise applications more accessible and valuable than ever.
It’s still early days but the ability to provide faster analytics using smaller data warehouse systems is a major IT opportunity.
While it’s hard to manage, the value of the data reflects well on the value of IT as a strategic competitive weapon.
Without them it would not be cost-effective to run most new applications and their associated IT systems.
The fastest way to give the business the IT agility it craves during tough economic times.
As this technology becomes easier to manage, security concerns become less pressing.
As the tools become more automated, IT organizations gain a fighting chance.
Modernizing tired, complex legacy systems by any other name.
