http://desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20061022/BUSINESS04/610220325/1001/NEWS By DAVID ELBERT REGISTER BUSINESS EDITOR October 22, 2006 The education pipeline for information technology is low and needs to be refilled. There are not enough smart students coming up to supply the future IT needs of employers and technology companies, says Iowa State University's Doug Jacobson. Not enough in college, not enough in high school. Jacobson should know. He's one of the nation's leading experts in the field. He created the computer security curriculum at ISU, and he's the founder of an Ames business, Palisade Systems, that provides technology security for businesses. The market for such services is big and growing, Jacobson said. It's estimated to be between $60 million and $70 million this year, and is expected to grow to several hundred million dollars in the next five years. The lack of students, he said, dates back to "sort of a triple witching hour" five or six years ago that wrongly convinced people that the bottom had fallen out of the market for information technology jobs. The "Y2K fizzle," the burst of the dot-com bubble and fears that computer technology jobs were all being outsourced overseas combined to discourage students from majoring in computer science, software engineering and other information technology fields, Jacobson said. Six years ago, when the triple witching started, Jacobson's own company had a half dozen employees. Today, it has 25. That's not a huge number, but the growth is significant if you take into account that it happened during a time of dramatic change, when a lot of technology companies were going belly up or being forced into downsizing mergers. After the dot-com crash, there was a glut of IT workers in Silicon Valley on the West Coast, and news stories about that situation convinced young people nationwide that computer science was not a good field to enter, Jacobson said. Iowa felt some of that fallout, but big financial service companies here, including Principal, Wells Fargo and Allied, continued to hire IT professionals and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future. A variety of other metro-area businesses, from technology suppliers like Alliance Technology and G-Commerce to high-tech manufacturers like Accumold and Embria Health Systems, are also growing. Jacobson's own area of security is an example of how the need for computer experts continues to evolve and grow. The ISU professor said his work amounts to "wall building." The first product that his company, Palisade, sold was called ScreenDoor. It created walls to block Web sites that parents considered objectionable or inappropriate for children, as well as sites that were unproductive for workers. The next two products, PacketDecoy and PacketGuard, built walls to keep outsiders from getting into computer networks. Today, the fire walls built by Palisade and other security systems have largely defused the threat of outside hackers, but now two new battlefields have emerged. Now, the worry isn't what gets into your computer, so much as what leaves it. For individuals, it's the threat that someone will gain access to your home computer through an Internet connection and steal valuable identification information, such as Social Security numbers and bank account information. For businesses, the threat has shifted from outside to inside. "It's really easy for stuff to leave an organization, either accidentally or on purpose," Jacobson said. Palisade's latest product, PacketSure, tacks the movement of data within a computer network with the goal of preventing sensitive information from being attached to an e-mail or disk or other vehicle that could be used to carry data to places it shouldn't be. The bottom line for businesses is that they need to be aware that computer technology is a double-edged sword. It can increase the productivity of workers by leaps and bounds, but it's also created hazards that didn't exist and that few people could have even imagined a decade ago. The good news for smart young students is that every technology advance creates new opportunities. The pipeline is open. Jump in and take a ride. _________________________________ Visit the InfoSec News store! http://www.shopinfosecnews.org
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