New technologies creating career opportunities for IT staff

The trend towards more collaborative working, combined with the adoption of new technologies such as virtualisation and cloud computing, has given rise to new career opportunities for IT professionals, according to the latest instalment of Cisco's Connected World report.

Staff collaborating with other newly integrated parts of the IT team will be exposed to new technologies and new career opportunities, the report found, with 50 per cent of the IT professionals questioned saying they expected new career opportunities to emerge over the next three years.

The report questioned IT decision makers from 13 countries (100 from each) and examined datacentre trends, looking at factors that are changing the shape of the datacentre, as well as virtualisation and cloud computing.

Factors likely to most change the shape of the datacentre are mobile access for employees (with 33 per cent citing this); datacentre virtualisation (at 32 per cent); and a unified LAN and WAN (29 per cent).

In terms of the uptake of cloud computing, just 18 per cent of respondents said they are currently using it, while an additional 34 per cent said that they are planning to do so. Cloud adoption rates are predicted to be highest in Brazil (70 per cent), China (69 per cent) and India (76 per cent).

IT managers also rated their top datacentre concerns as security, performance, reliability, and budget for maintenance and management.

In addition, respondents said that their top datacentre priorities for the next three years are to improve agility and speed in deploying business applications (33 per cent), better manage resource capacity (31 per cent), increase datacentre resilience (19 per cent) and reduce power and cooling costs (17 per cent).