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Demand for highly trained and certified IT security professionals is forcing CIOs and IT managers to shell out higher salaries, and to adjust their budgets to meet the increased security expectations of their customers and their executive management teams.
In the past six months, salaries for certified IT workers rose 2 percent, bucking a yearlong trend in declining pay for IT certifications, according to a report issued this week by IT work force research firm Foote Partners.
Whether its vendor-sponsored certification from the likes of Cisco, IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Microsoft and Oracle, or independent organizations such as the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium or The SANS Institute, companies are fighting among themselves to keep and attract systems administrators and database analysts who have the ideal blend of technical expertise and security acumen.
“In the past, wed ask CIOs if their companies were taking steps to strengthen security in the wake of high-profile identity and data theft incidents, and about 34 percent of them werent,” said David Foote, the reports author. “They need highly credentialed people to deal with deadly security issues, but some of them seemed to be ignoring the problem. Thats odd, because IT usually never ignores anything.”