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| CURRENT SECTION :: News | UK's most visited IT Contractor Site - 250k unique visitors March 2008 |
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In the same month that we discover 38% of contractors prefer pies to cakes – in a perfectly scientific survey conducted on the CUK bulletin board – and John Prescott announces his rotund figure would have been much more rotund were it not for an eating disorder, the rest of the world is still digesting the distasteful effects of the credit crunch. The outlook for IT contractors seems to have darkened. Pierre Audoin Consultants (PAC) predicts the gloom will quickly spread from the financial sector into other vertical markets rather like an erupting Mount Doom casts a shadow on Middle Earth. "For example, [the] retail sector which is seeing a decline in sales and profit margins. Reduced profits mean reduced investment back into the business, including IT projects [and] IT contractors," Rajeena Brar, a consultant at PAC, told CUK. As the words left the analyst’s lips (or maybe slightly before), Logica decided to shed 500 UK jobs, and the news broke of thirteen profit warnings issued by FTSE listed IT and software companies in the opening months of 2008 – up 44% from the nine warnings in the last quarter of 2007, and hitting a new peak. It is a "reflection of current market conditions", said a report from Ernst & Young, with the companies blaming "sales short of forecast" as the main reason for issuing warnings. Yet, as in previous months, it's not all bad, and at least one area of IT is doing very nicely, thank you. That area is social networking. While many old fogies still can't see the point, (myself included) IT analyst Forrester says Web 2.0 is set to be embraced by Enterprise 2.0 as businesses prepare to spend nearly $5 billion on social networking tools by 2013. The research comes just as the Web 2.0 expo opens in San Francisco; a "gathering of technical, design, marketing, and business professionals who are building the next generation web." Good luck to them. It seems Enterprise 2.0 will buy anything they dream up, and even as the credit crunch bites, is that Dot Com Bust 2.0 lurking round the corner? But the other big issue of the month is also tied to an expo. At the same time effervescent, T-shirted Americans gather on the West Coast, depressed black-suited Britons congregate at Olympia for the annual carefree security fest known as Infosec. To suggest that security has been in the news this month just because all the IT public relations firms are gearing up for Infosec would be ill-mannered, and it cannot be suggested HSBC staged the loss of 320,000 sets of personal details just to publicise an exhibition. No, info security is in the news because British businesses are bad at it. Bad at it, that is, according to a survey by consultant PricewaterhouseCoopers. Even though companies have tripled their budgets for security in the last six years the average seriousness of incidents has increased, and most victim companies experience other breaches in the same year. Once bitten, twice bitten! Furthermore, two-thirds of the 1,000 businesses interviewed did not prevent confidential data leaving on USB sticks, and 79% were clueless about the security standards BS7799/ISO27001. But while most UK businesses are still at the stage of working out if USB sticks and wireless network devices can be used for nefarious purpose, the hackers are finding cleverer and cleverer ways of compromising their victims. It turns out that the software application layer is where most hackers access critical data, and analyst Quocirca showed that organisations outsourcing half of their coding work are the likeliest victims. "[Organisations] are entrusting large parts of their application development needs to third parties," said Fran Howarth, principal analyst. Typically, a rogue developer writes vulnerabilities in the code, perhaps inserting a "backdoor" that can be later used to infiltrate a network. And this is not the only malware route of which most companies are blissfully unaware. Ken Munro, managing director of penetration testers Secure Test, believes rogue software imported in the firmware of a company's network devices is a likely next stage in hacking escalation. "Organisations should change their security policies and procedures immediately. This is a very real loophole that needs closing," says Munro, suggesting the UK's network security might already be compromised by infected Far Eastern firmware. It's frightening stuff. But not quite as frightening as the poor contractor who discovered his agent was charging a 25% mark-up on his services. "Was it excessive?" he asked. Predictably, one of the agencies answering his question said it was none of his business, that their margin was unrelated to his fee. Yeah right, like the cost of something is not related to the likelihood of you buying it! And which contractors will be let go first when IT budgets are cut in the coming financial meltdown? Those that cost the most, "contractor’s rate + agency fee"! Luckily, as in the early nineties, I suspect a lot of profiteering agents who have taken too big a slice of the pie during the boom years will need to ration their diet, or will simply wither away from starvation as the feeding ends. William Knight Apr 25, 2008 Email this article Printer friendly page Previous Page
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