Wanted: Techies with mobile skills

With the increasing infiltration of mobile devices and related applications in corporate networks, IT administrators in Asia may soon have to suit up with relevant skills to manage this growing trend.

Akshay Amar Garkel, senior consultant for professional services at Datacraft India, told silicon.com sister site ZDNet Asia that the use of mobile devices to access various applications ranging from email to business critical applications, is gaining widespread dominance in India. Akshay added: "Wide acceptance of mobile infrastructure solutions is growing in the industry today."

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Neil Bamberger, IT manager for mobility solutions at Cisco Systems, said the network equipment vendor has seen a "massive increase globally" in the number of customers - from 9,000 to 24,000 within four years - using mobile messaging services on different platforms.

Bamberger said in an email interview: "Mobile devices, as well as the services behind them, are becoming mission-critical in the enterprise."

However, industry players say the demand for network administrators specially trained and certified to support mobile devices, is not necessarily an urgent one just yet.

Adam Bowden from recruitment firm Robert Walters said there is a gradual increase in demand for IT administrators with the expertise to support devices such as RIM BlackBerry, on corporate networks.

Kang Eu Ween, Asia-Pacific enterprise solutions director at Juniper Networks said in an email interview that demand for these network managers, however, "will not be immediate". He added: "Maybe much further down the year, or [such demand] may not even surface at all."

In addition to having the basic skills to support and manage employees who use mobile applications, it is important for administrators to have network security expertise.

Shalini Verma, research manager of communications research IDC Asia-Pacific, said letting business users access their email and corporate information on mobile devices introduces security challenges for IT administrators.

Hence, Shalini said, they must have the know-how of maintaining data confidentiality. "IT managers will need to be familiar with the security risks and know the steps required to prevent network intrusion and removal of the data on the device, in case of device loss or theft."

Kang agreed, and noted that network administrators will have to provide a growing number of end-user mobile devices access to the corporate network. "This will mean an ever-increasing threat vectors for the administrator [so] security will become a top concern for the network administrators," he said.

Original article: Network admin skills going mobile from ZDNet Asia