Focus of CIOs has to be staffing with the dynamic moves in the IT Job Market

CIO Job DescriptionThe IT job market continues to tighten.  As a matter of fact is has gotten worse in the the 3rd quarter.

Despite having to cope with massive budget cuts, salary freezes and demoralized staffs, most employed IT executives are more satisfied with their jobs this year than they have been in previous years, according to the results of a job satisfaction survey. Part of the reason is that normally during a recession those who have jobs are very thankful and will "put up" with a lot because they know there are fewer options for them. 

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US Government data points to continued hard times for IT professionals

The job market for IT professionals, though better than the rest of the employment market, still continues to be sluggish.

IT Job Market - Updated Data

BLS employment data

Updated with the latest IT Job Market information. For more go to IT Job Market.The Bureau of Labor (BLS) statistics show a drop in the total employment of IT professionals from a year ago.  The areas were there has been the greatest shrinkage are telecommunications and data processing services.  Both of these sectors continue to be adversely impacted by outsourcing.

There has  been a slight increase in employment numbers in system design and IT services. This has not been enough to absorb the displaced employees from prior periods nor address the issue of recent entrants into the IT job market who can not find work. 

When Janco compared the total employment picture of the 3rd quarter of this year to the 2nd quarter,  they found that the job market has deteriorated over the summer.  In subsequent follow-up interviews, with CIOs and CEOs at a number of large firms, the consensus is that the recession  is not over and that budgets for 2011, which had assumed a marked improvement in the economic climate, will need to be revisited and possibly reduced.

Everyone who participates will receive a complementary copy of the study summary, companies that provide ten or more data points will receive a complementary copy of the entire salary survey.  The study will be released in early January.

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Business Continuity & Disaster Planning Requirements Defined

DRP and BCP TemplateBusiness Continuity and Disaster Planning require data consistency with the synchronous replication of data over long-distances and / or journal replication to protect against local and wide-area disasters. This technology provides other benefits, including:

  • Maintaining more efficient data currency. Using synchronous replication over a short distance in a campus or metropolitan area cluster provides the highest level of data currency without undue impact to application performance.
  • Permitting swift recovery. A campus/metropolitan cluster implementation allows for fast automated failovers after a local area disaster with minimal to no transaction loss.
  • Permitting recovery even when a disaster exceeds traditional regional boundaries. A wide-area disaster could disable both data centers 1 and 2, but with some manual interaction, operations can be shifted to data center 3 and continue after the disaster.
  • Shifting to staffing outside the disaster area. A wide-area disaster also affects people located within the disaster area, both professionally and personally. By moving operations out of the region to a remotely located recovery data center, operational responsibilities shift to people not directly affected by the disaster.

Janco has defined a Template with a Backup and Backup Retention policy that is a complete policy which can be implemented immediately.  The document is provided in both Word 2003 and MS WORD format and is easily modified.  This policy is included in the Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity Template.

Below is a table from the policy.
Backup

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