As a former systems and network administrator, I understand the demands that are placed on today’s IT professionals. It’s true that skills gap continues to hamper IT and security personnel, for example. In early 2020, Tripwire revealed the results of a survey in which 83% of security professionals noted that they felt more overworked going into that year than they did at the start of 2019. Approximately the same percentage said that their security teams were understaffed and that it had become more difficult over the past few years to hire skilled security talent.

As we all know, things changed in March 2020. Throw in a pandemic and working from home, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what IT professionals are up against these days. To adapt to those changes, many organizations embraced digital transformation. Their networks have grown in size and complexity as a result, thus complicating the work of IT and security teams. The constant pressures of needing to make sure that everything is up and running…the inevitable outages and teams’ subsequent efforts to track down what happened…the ongoing program of monitoring for and preventing threats…the incessant flood of requests from business owners for new services…and the desire to implement new technologies…the demands are high, and the list is never ending. 

With so many items to juggle, what IT or security professional has the time to commit to working with a vendor for eight hours a day, sometimes five days a week, around learning to deploy new technologies? Maybe they only have one-hour available Monday, two hours Tuesday, and three on Thursday. Maybe they have more time open to them. Maybe they even have less.

But what if team members didn’t need to lose entire weeks to get their questions answered? What if they (Read more...)