When Majestic Realty Co., a Los Angeles-based commercial real estate developer, moved to Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS) for cloud-based email in early 2011, CIO Jon Grunzweig was shocked by the lack of technical support he found for BPOS in the marketplace.

Email phishing scams have grown more sophisticated since they first began popping up in corporate inboxes in the 1990s. Early phishing emails were relatively easy to detect as they were characterized by poor grammar and spelling. No legitimate business would send an email to customers chockfull of typos.

Why is it so hard to hire software engineers? Does it have to be so difficult to find good developers?

While Jeff Schmidt, the CEO of JAS Global Advisors, was surfing the Web on his new Android smartphone (his first Android phone) earlier this year, what appeared to be an ad popped up on his screen. The "ad" looked like the prompt that appears when his phone rings. He clicked the button on the ad to pick up the putative call, and the ad began downloading a binary file - malware - onto his Android phone. Schmidt had been hit by a drive-by download, a program that automatically installs malicious software on end-users' computers--and increasingly, smartphones--without them knowing.

Would you bet money on the security of your company's systems? If your answer is no, you're far from alone. Most IT professionals lack so much confidence in the security of their organizations' networks that they wouldn't bet a dime on it, according to the results of a recent survey.

CIOs who've been hard-pressed to make convincing business cases for increasing their training budgets may now have the data they need. Results of a recent survey conducted by the Computer Technology Industry Association (CompTIA) show the impact of IT skills shortages on organizations' profitability, productivity, innovation, speed to market, security and customer service.

Search for "online MBA programs" and you'll be met with a staggering array of options. These days, it seems every institute of higher learning offers an online MBA program.

Daniel Markovitz has been a student of lean manufacturing since he first read The Machine that Changed the World as a Stanford Business School student in 1992. Six years ago, when he became a time management and productivity consultant, Markovitz began studying how individual workers might benefit from the principles of lean manufacturing.

Applicant tracking systems are the bane of legions of job seekers. These systems, which employers use to manage job openings across their enterprises and screen incoming resumes from job seekers, kill 75 percent of candidates' chances of landing an interview as soon as they submit their resumes, according to job search services provider Preptel.

The biggest hurdle job seekers face today is attracting recruiters' and hiring managers' attention. This challenge has grown more difficult over the last three years, as the recession forced millions of people onto the job market and as employers increasingly turned to applicant tracking systems to manage all of their job openings and the sea of candidates applying for them.

Demanding full-time jobs, often coupled with hectic family responsibilities, prevent many IT professionals from pursuing the continuing education and professional development programs they need to remain relevant in the mercurial IT industry and competitive job market. But IT professionals who don't make time to take classes, study on their own, earn certifications or pursue advanced degrees risk becoming obsolete.

Everyone knows the fundamental reason why we procrastinate: We lack self-discipline. We simply don't want to do the work we need to complete when we need to address it. So we delay the inevitable. We grab a snack, check our e-mail, find something else to do.

While staffing firms report that IT salaries are growing, Foote Partners, a boutique IT benchmarking and research firm in Vero Beach, Fla., has been observing a different trend.

In the first quarter of 2011, enterprise users encountered an average of 274 web-based malware attacks, a 103 percent increase over 2010, according to research from Cisco ScanSafe. Why the dramatic increase? One major cause is the growing number of drive-by download attacks.

Project management may not be the most exciting job in IT these days, especially when most of the talk about hot IT jobs pertains to software developers, information security professionals and business intelligence analysts.