Since the arrival of the pandemic, Sysadmins at organizations worldwide have had to adjust to working remotely, addressing myriad challenges faced by workers in completely remote or hybrid work environments, and getting used to new collaboration and productivity solutions to ensure a smooth transition from once a completely in-office culture. On this SysAdmin Day, let’s know more about the difficulties faced by system administrators, also known as the backbone of an organization.
Remote work ushered in by the pandemic has posed new challenges to businesses that had never previously changed their work dynamics. System administration staff has typically handled these problems in each company. A surveyOpens a new window by Remotely found that ensuring the security of workers was a major pain point for 33% of remote IT teams. A majority of them were bogged down in the details of provisioning services and apps, managing user identities, dealing with staff members who have disregarded best IT practices, and assisting in onboarding new employees during the largest and quickest transition in the physical workplace in eons.
The admins maintained the accessibility and uptime of most crucial IT services for years, typically camouflaging them in the background. However, with the mass adoption of the work-from-home model, more and more cloud services and DevOps practices started to get deployed. This made the role of systems administrators more challenging. They constantly ensure that the workforce operates as safely as possible, which is why we refer to them as the unsung heroes of the current work environment.
On this SysAdmins Day, let’s learn more about the myriad issues these IT heroes face everyday to make your work-from-home experience as safe and secure as possible.
Top Challenges SysAdmins Face During Teleworking
Change in user requests delayed other important tasks
Many sysadmins have been grapplingOpens a new window with constantly-changing demands of employees. Some of these demands are as below:
- Employees had to use a different tool/machine at home. Thus, it was necessary to demonstrate how it operates and ease their anxiety about the abrupt transition.
- There was a massive surge of folks who required the internet from home and looked up for help in the adjustment era. And system administrators assisted users in setting this up.
- During the adjustment phase, certain existing sysadmin initiatives, like enhancing the company’s internal IT communications infrastructure, lost importance. In contrast, others were expedited, including putting projects that enable online work into place.
- As a result, new activities like building up the necessary infrastructure to enable remote work, helping colleagues access it, and helping them set up their home offices, for example, became top priorities right away.
- A virtual private network (VPN), access to MS Teams, and Zoom were among the communication and access options that the administrators had to make available. They also had to deal with capacity problems with the VPN servers’ video conferencing software or even their private Internet connection and assist users in becoming accustomed to these communication tools.
- System administrators also had to assist a help desk crew swamped with user requests starting to work from home and needing their remote connection to set up a home office.
All these additional activities and work resulted in delays in the sysadmins’ principal tasks that occasionally went beyond months.
See More: Top Skills Linux SysAdmins Should Ace in 2022
More coordination for routine tasks
Common chores like updates and code reviews/security reviews, which must be performed with other sysadmins and coworkers, need extra preparation due to communication limitations. For instance, more than one individual is typically involved in the due diligence process. Consequently, you seek the opinions of others. Then, you will either need to contact this individual or wait one or two days before you can have a video chat with them. Everyday activities took longer to perform than previously since more coordination was needed because there were no casual exchanges earlier.
Security challenges
Working from home has opened up several new attack points, such as people utilizing personal computing devices and third-party online communication platforms. Virtual conferences that took place during the lockdown were documented and preserved. This resulted in producing official logs and increased the possibility of a data breach. Also, several unethical practices like “password sharing†and the disclosure of private information over chat were discovered. A sysadmin handles all of these security concerns. These activities, however important they are, can be controlled and help admins utilize their time productively. There are a few recommendations for managers and supervisors to improve the working circumstances for sysadmins. These are:
- Help them separate formal commitments from casual exchanges.
- Tools that should aid in reaching a consensus immediately with users without requiring additional coordinating efforts.
- Giving them the right to independently use their administrative powers to assist and collaborate in their job.
- Should be given enough control over their duties and functions by leadership so they may create and execute effective procedures that help them perform their duties smoothly.
See More: SysAdmins: The Unsung Heroes of the Modern-day Workplace
Network and connectivity issues
Internet traffic has increased by 10 to 40% in urban areas since the pandemic began. Although this has greatly disrupted the internet, Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have expanded their systems to support this expansion. Despite being powerless to alter these widespread difficulties with the internet, sysadmins are making concerted efforts to help the workforce handle connectivity problems effectively. Some of the steps taken by Sysadmins included:
- Notifying customers that their bandwidth would be limited by any network activity, including internet streaming, games, and TV shows
- Letting them know that certain cellular and ISP providers waive additional fees and provide inexpensive service upgrades in their location.
- Educating individuals on how to tie their laptop to a cell phone’s internet connection and build a mobile hotspot in case of an outage.
The system administrators labor round-the-clock to ensure that their staff has a reliable, secure network connection.
Conclusion
The pandemic’s effects highlighted the significance of system administrators, who modify, adapt, and maintain new procedures to keep enabling and supporting others in their job. On this SysAdmin Day, let’s recognize the hard work that administrators put in every day and let them know how crucial they are to the IT infrastructure.
Can you list a few instances where your company’s sysadmin came to your rescue? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to know!