8 IT lessons from TR Live 2011

TechRepublic kicked off its TR Live meetup Wednesday and notable nuggets of IT intelligence surfaced throughout the day.

In between presenting, writing and other items to juggle, there were a few key items worth noting. Here are my eight takeaways from the event:

1. Skepticism over cloud security remains the biggest hurdle among the IT pros in attendance. Questions ranged from subpoena powers to attacks to outages. In other words, few were willing to place their businesses solely in the hands of a cloud provider. For me, the security hang-up was notable since I'd probably bet that the cloud providers have stronger data protection controls.
2. In a breakout session over mobile strategy, there was universal agreement that HTML5 was the way to go. These IT pros seemed willing to bet that apps sold through someone else's marketplace was a rat hole. In other words, enterprises were willing to follow the lead of SlideShare. For more on the topic see: Apple's garden wall is cracking |  SlideShare dumps Flash goes HTML5: Developer resources vs. multiple apps
3. There were serious concerns about Android fragmentation. The biggest problem for developers: You have to test an app on multiple phones. It can be a developer resource waste.
4. End user support is a massive headache due to the proliferation of devices. IT pros would like more control, but consumerization makes that difficult.
5. One programmer noted that his company was dumping Microsoft SharePoint for Liferay. Primary reason is that the company wanted a more open source approach.
6. A Sun customer noted that support has tanked since Oracle bought the company. He has Sun infrastructure for servers and storage. He's planning to move off Sun, but is looking at a 12 to 18 month project.
7. Most tech managers agreed that IT departments need to be more entrepreneurial. However, a breakout session on deriving ROI from IT turned into a therapy session.
8. On the information security front, IT workers may be breaking the law inadvertently. How? The number of cybersecurity laws has ballooned and unless you have a lawyer at your side, no tech worker can keep on top of regulations.