Yesterday, CompTIA announced that one of their members, Dan Shapero, founder of ClikCloud, went before a U.S. House of Representatives Subcommittee to discuss two national policy issues that are creating undue stress on the SMB IT field.
To be specific, his meeting with the Small Business Subcommittee on Health and Technology covered workforce development and national data breach notification policies. Mr. Shapero, who has over 25 years of experience in the IT industry, pushed for policy reform that will ultimately ensure better security practices and encourage SMBs to offer IT services across state lines. His primary goal, as stated below, is to bring SMB IT on a more even competitive level with large enterprises, particularly when going after top IT talent.
Mr. Shapero’s testimony was as follows:
“The majority of cyber-attacks create exposure across state lines and are an area of serious concern. There are currently 47 state data breach notification (DBN) laws in place, imposing duplicative costs and an undue burden on SMBs. These issues are compounded in the context of the cloud due to the mobility of data. In a cloud environment, data travels across multiple jurisdictions adding more uncertainty for SMBs who may not have the resources to understand their DBN compliance obligations.”
“Another issue that we face as small and medium-sized businesses is the ability to recruit and retain in-house talent to help protect ourselves from cyber-attacks. However, there is a skills-gap issue that is affecting the IT community as a whole. There are approximately 250,000 open IT jobs in the U.S. at any given time. As the SMB community, not only are we competing with the rest of the world for this talent, we are competing against other larger U.S. companies with big names.”
Mr. Shapero will be a Speaker at this year’s SMB Nation Spring Conference, running May 3-5 in Redmond, WA, presenting sessions on Entering a New Vertical Market and Accelerating a Cloud Business.
