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It may not be obvious to the casual observer, but IT is under siege. The cloud, in all its incarnations, is reshaping the way IT thinks about delivering services to the business. Conversely, the cloud is also providing new avenues for the business to procure IT services. For the first time, business users who consume IT services have a choice: if IT cannot provide them with the services they require in a timely and cost-effective manner, they'll simply go elsewhere.

Some CIOs have taken to labeling this trend "shadow IT," in that users are following the path of least resistance - IT policies be damned. The ubiquity of these cloud services, meanwhile, is forcing CIOs to understand their cost structure at a much more granular level. After all, if you know that it costs $7 per GB of storage to go with Amazon S3, but can't say with any certainty what you spend on storage, it's hard to have a meaningful conversation with the business. To put it another way, the cloud is putting increased pressure on CIOs to deliver IT services at established "market rates."

We've covered the increased demand for IT professionals here recently and outlined which skills are in highest demand. Now Modis, an IT staffing firm, has released some additional data on what jobs are in demand and why.

This infographic looks at the best cities to find tech jobs (which we already covered here), why companies are keeping talent in-house and the hottest job titles.

IT professionals need to wear a lot of hats. It is not just enough to be the "server expert" or the "mobile expert." IT departments are often stretched thin by the amount of work that is necessary to get every employee in the business working at optimum efficiency. That means being the server expert, mobile expert, cloud, virtualization, unified communications and applications expert, all rolled in to one person.

What are the applications that IT experts need to be able to function at optimum performance? The ability to streamline aspects of the business into one application is very useful. Here are five applications that help IT professionals do their jobs at peak efficiency.

Our posts on trends shaping the IT job market and the best U.S. cities for finding IT jobs were quite popular. While demand for tech workers is strong even in this so-called "jobless recovery," some skills are in more demand than others. There is also the problem of matching your skill set with jobs, considering how many employers demand deep experience in many different technologies.

How are you feeling about your current skill set?

CTOs know that today, when it comes to IT, more is no longer better. IT departments in every industry are faced with static or shrinking budgets and the mounting pressure to do more with less. To reduce operating expenses and network spending, they must find ways to maximize their current investments rather than make new ones. Opportunities for outsourcing infrastructure and applications management, WAN optimization, cloud hosting and software-as-a-service (SaaS) are now available, and can help IT departments meet their budgetary requirements.

IT salaries are up after a two year decline, according to CIO.com. That's good news, considering the level of dissatisfaction IT professionals are experiencing.

Meanwhile, hiring is up as well. Dennis B. Moore has analyzed listings from Dice.com and found an overall increase of 6.1% in the past three months, and a 46.2% increase over the past year. Moore looked at four areas: database, applications, languages and platforms. Moore found some surprising results.

This one's for the engineers, the programmers, the database administrators, the sysadmins, the networking gurus, and the rest of that army of people that gets deployed when a major outage happens.

While the rest of us grouse that we can't check in at our local haunts, or log on with our Twitter app of choice, or vote a story up or down on Reddit - or even do something a little more directly tied to social or economic productivity - those folks are working brutal hours under intense pressure to get everything back up again.

I recently purchased a copy of an issue of the defunct popular science magazine OMNI from 1978 - three years before I was born. In addition to a lengthy interview with Alvin Toffler, a cover by H.R. Giger and an article on human-dolphin communication by John C. Lily it contains an article by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson titled "Computer Lib."

I've read Nelson's book of the same title, but I can't remember if this is an excerpt from the book or if it's unique to OMNI. In a section on lock-in, Nelson describes what may be the first wave of consumerization of IT.

We'll start a three-part series next week that explores how community is changing in the enterprise.

The three elements that we will be addressing in the series are external communities, internal communities and the relevance of communities to the cloud.

For a long time the IT worker visited a customer to fix a stricken desktop. Often it did not take super human steps to fix the problem. More often than not, it went something like this:

"Chet, I have discovered the problem. Your computer is unplugged. I am now plugging it back in."