(Jody Gilbert, TechRepublic) What areas should you focus on over the next year? This survey-based list highlights the 10 most sought-after IT skills.

At the end of last year, the Global Knowledge/TechRepublic 2010 Salary Survey asked, “What skill set will your company be looking to add in 2010?”. The skills listed by respondents include a mix of perennial favorites and cutting edge technologies. Here’s the complete list:

1. Project management
2. Security - It’s a never-ending game of cat and mouse for security professionals, and 2009 proved to be another fun-filled year. According to Symantec’s Security and Storage Trends to Watch report, the number of spam messages containing malware increased ninefold, to represent more than 2% of emails.
3. Network administration - Networking administration skills never lose their luster.
4. Virtualization — Cloud - With the cloud computing space now taking shape, it’s difficult for enterprises to find pros with substantial relevant experience.[...]

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(Morgan Stewart,emailInsider) The Wall Street Journal is the latest to jump on the "email is dead" bandwagon. The article, "Why Email No Longer Rules... and what that means for the way we communicate," opens with the proclamation, "Email has had a good run as king of communications. But its reign is over." But they couldn't be more wrong. Email's future is looking even brighter today than it was just three years ago. Here's why:

Increased use of social media drives increased use of email
Among those using social media more over the past six months, 44% also report using email more, compared to only 4% using email less.[...]

Smartphones are driving more email use
43% of Blackberry users and 42% of iPhone users report using email more often over the past six months, compared to fewer than 3% who are using email less often. Monday, a press release from the Radicati Group estimated 139 million mobile email users. They also said, "Over the next four years, we expect this figure to increase at an average annual rate of 68%, totaling over 1 billion mailboxes by year-end 2013." Smartphones are also changing how email is used among college students.[...]

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(Sarah Perez, ReadWriteWeb) According to the latest study from Juniper Research, the market for cloud-based mobile applications will grow 88% from 2009 to 2014.

The market was just over $400 million this past year, report says, but by 2014 it will reach $9.5 billion. Driving this growth will be the adoption of the new web standard HTML5, increased mobile broadband coverage and the need for always-on collaborative services for the enterprise.[...] 

Enterprise Drives Mobile Growth - Like the earlier report from ABI, Juniper also sees the enterprise as a major force behind the move to the cloud. 75% of the mobile cloud-based application market is enterprise, notes the report. Mobile apps allow corporate users to access company data, share files, collaborate on projects and more via their smartphones. This business need will help fund the growth and development of the mobile cloud-based app market.[...] 

(Steven Andrés, PC World) Whether your business is a big fish or a small-fry home office, you can get hacked just the same, and the stakes are higher than a few canceled credit cards. Here are a few tips to protect your users and your networks - steps that even enterprise-class security specialists may slip up on.

Steps for small businesses and enterprise-class security specialists:

1. Know Who Might Be Targeted - and How and Why
2. Don't Take the Bait
3. Use Unique Email Addresses to Keep Password Reset Emails at Bay
4. Don't click on anything in email
5. Patch Early, Patch Often
6. Don't Let Bob Stop You From Running a Secure Network
7. The P of P2P Is Personal, Not Business
8. Nail Down Your Network

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(Chris Silva, ZDNet) While mobile enterprise seems to be a lot of futurespeak, it turns out it does actually matter to CIOs, and has been highlighted in Forrester’s  recent “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report.

According to the report, all three areas - mobile networks gaining in power, mobile devices strengthening and mobile apps going mobile - represent an area of high business impact. The upside of arming your users with the combination of these three technology elements can reap great rewards in productivity, user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Thinking about mobile as not just a “now” technology, but taking into account networks, devices, and software as one connected ecosystem will ensure an investment in one of the three, key areas of mobility does not adversely affect the others. After all, successful implementations of technology will allow it to change business for better, not for worse.