IT: Much More than Tech

People often use the words IT and tech interchangeably, but they aren't entirely the same thing. The tech industry does include parts of IT (and maybe makes up most of it), but it also includes industries like bio, green, automotive and other "techs".

What separates IT from the others is that IT is first and foremost about bringing the pieces together. The IT industry is about bringing hardware, software, services and infrastructure all together to power, connect and enable. And that's the industry CompTIA represents.

In the component pieces, hardware is the easiest to define. It's routers, switches, computers, monitors, printers, etc.

Software is probably equally as well defined but with a couple of wrinkles. Whereas it takes tremendous manufacturing capacity to produce a CPU, the programs that run on the machine can be written by anyone with the know how. Software is pre-packaged, custom developed or available in the cloud.

Services really bring IT to life. Monitoring, backup and security were the early staples of the managed service provider, but now the model has morphed into many more options.

Everything requires infrastructure, however, to run – fiber, copper, wireless, spectrum, cell towers, your own LAN and the Internet as the uber-piece of infrastructure.

All four technologies, hardware, software, services and infrastructure come together to create the IT industry and make everything else possible.