The big security/storage crossover: Is your job safe? [Part One: The recruiter]

According to Jane Bianchini, national manager of Candle ICT, the looming convergence of storage and security is nothing to worry about.,

"We are not witnessing an industry convergence of security and storage on a large scale," Bianchini told TechTarget ANZ.

"Certainly not enough to change the future career paths of security or storage experts here in the Australian market where we are relatively small players in enterprise storage innovation."

"In our view, professionals in either field need not worry unduly: there will remain two independent technologies for storage and security, and two very rewarding and lucrative career paths, for a long time to come."

She does, however, see some changes.

"What we are seeing is a convergence of security and storage occurring purely at a specialised level. As the amount of corporate IP and data storage increases, so does the need to ensure its protection. It is in this area that we will see an emerging niche requirement for storage security experts with skills across both technologies."

So who will be best equipped to fill this new niche?

Bianchini says that those with a storage background will be the most likely to succeeed.

"These new experts will come from a storage rather than security background (it is unlikely that a security professional would have the skills needed to secure a SAN, NAS, RAID cluster or any other storage technologies) and will need to be trained in security skills specific to storage requirements."

But security specialists should not feel left out.

"Australia will always need security specialists to protect enterprises from such things as physical attack, hacking, email threats, internal disgruntled employee damage and border router and network invasion," she says. "These specialists are also often highly skilled in data management, data integrity and disaster recovery and their skills will always be in high demand. Storage too is a wide and diverse platform and professionals specialising in the emerging areas of virtualisation, storage area networks, network attached storage, storage farms and dynamic virtual storage in particular will also be in high demand."