When hiring IT professionals, managers often have more questions than answers. What skill sets do I need for this project or initiative? Does the candidate have those skill sets? Are the candidate’s certifications valuable? What kind of salary should I offer?

It’s a lot like buying a used car. You don’t know if that car has been in a serious wreck, had extensive mechanical problems or recalls, was ever stolen, or is encumbered by a lien — unless you get a CARFAX report. With that report, you have a better idea of what you’re getting and how much you should pay.

That’s the value DeSeMa brings to the technical recruiting process. Whether you’re hiring for a full-time position or using staff augmentation services to obtain resources for a short-term project, DeSeMa can conduct an in-depth technical review of a candidate’s skills to determine if that individual can perform the job.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT software has dominated IT industry headlines in recent months, with many pundits pontificating on the future of artificial intelligence. When asked an open-ended question, the ChatGPT app will generate text on that subject. GPT-3, the pre-trained multi-modal large language model behind ChatGPT, is also used to create graphics, power search engines, gain insight from customer feedback, and more. OpenAI introduced a new version, GPT-4, on March 14, 2023.

Two days later, Microsoft announced the debut of Microsoft 365 Copilot, an AI-powered assistant based on GPT-4. Copilot can help Excel users take advantage of advanced functions and data visualizations, and generate the first draft of a document in Word for the user to edit and expand.

But Business Chat is the most intriguing Copilot feature. This chatbot tool crawls all the data in the organization’s Microsoft ecosystem — Outlook emails, Teams messages, calendar entries and documents — and summarizes any data relevant to the user’s natural language prompt. It then works with other Office apps to draft emails, generate Word docs, create PowerPoint presentations and more.

It also opens a Pandora’s box of security and regulatory compliance threats. Is your data ready?

In our last post How DeSeMa’s Talent Appraisal Capabilities Take the Guesswork Out of Hiring, we discussed the challenges associated with endpoint provisioning and management as endpoint devices proliferate. Manual processes consume a significant amount of technicians’ time that could be better spent on business-enabling initiatives. User productivity is also negatively impacted, particularly for remote workers.

While organizations can gain efficiencies by implementing automated tools, endpoint provisioning and management remains a distraction. A better approach is to outsource to a managed services provider such as DeSeMa.

Our last point focused on the provisioning component of our endpoint managed services. Provisioning is only the beginning — our services span the endpoint device lifecycle, and cover PCs, laptops, mobile devices and fleet-managed cell phones.

Cloud repatriation is a hot topic, with IT industry analysts predicting that more organizations will migrate workloads from public cloud platforms back onto on-premises infrastructure. Cost is the usual reason. Many organizations have seen their cloud spend spiral out of control and are looking to rein in those costs.

The problem is that few organizations understand why their cloud costs are skyrocketing. They also assume they have no control over those costs. In reality, however, there are steps they could take to reduce their cloud expenses while still enjoying the benefits of a public cloud environment.

Let’s look at the three real reasons for sky-high cloud costs.