It’s July 30th and System Administration Appreciation Day. It’s time to celebrate the contributions of sysadmins and IT teams who tirelessly keep our IT services stack up and running, all the year around. System Administrators are known as the backbone of any IT infrastructure. In the Cloud era, SysAdmins have transformed into DevOps, Cloud, and Site Reliability Engineers. The buck stops with them to ensure performance and availability on a global scale is constantly improving. Although we should be appreciating them every day, SysAdmin Day is here to remind us of their incredible feats and support.
Particularly over the last year and a half, our IT teams have been in overdrive mode ensuring organizational systems and data are safe amid the rapid shift to remote and hybrid working.
Amid the ongoing pandemic, the criticality and immeasurable value of SysAdmins’ role took center stage as the world was sent home to work, learn, shop, and do virtually everything else. And while many of us know it was far easier said than done. SysAdmins were tasked with ensuring secure and ongoing access to information, applications, and communication. Successfully accomplishing this alone rightly earned SysAdmins star status in their organizations.
Read More: The Importance of Arming SysAdmins With Proper Migration Tools
The scheme of things was further compounded by the ever-expanding ransomware attacks during the pandemic. Indeed, ransomware has continued to evolve becoming increasingly intelligent and ruthless, employing such capabilities as watching for cloud account credentials, deleting backups and cloud storage, and then encrypting everything, and demanding a ransom. Against this as a recovery panacea, SysAdmins elevated their backup strategy from basic to unbreakable. In other words, they knew that for today’s ransomware they needed to protect backed up data by making it immutable and by eliminating any way that data could be deleted or corrupted.
In a SysAdmin Appreciation Day Special, Toolbox caught up with some of the key practitioners to understand how system administrators are continuing to expand their remit and driving value in untold ways.
1. Got-Your-Back Support 24X7
Daniel LizamaOpens a new window , team manager system administration, LeasewebOpens a new window “The entire world shifted on its axis in the past year and a half, yet our sysadmins still managed to produce the quality needed for customers. They are the backbone of organizations, maintaining, upgrading, and troubleshooting office systems, internal networks, firewalls, and routers, to guarantee quality for end-users.
Day after day, these professionals manage to produce solutions to problems. On this year’s Sysadmin Day, I would like to acknowledge all of the ‘Sysadmin Heroes’ out there who have the back of every workstation, internal network, and office system.â€
2. Multitaskers – It’s in the Genes
Samantha HumphriesOpens a new window , head of security strategy EMEA, ExabeamOpens a new window “SysAdmins are expected to wear multiple hats and be the first point of contact when things go wrong but often go without any thanks. The go-to for all things analytical, they are responsible for so many aspects of a company’s IT systems, including designing and building technical controls for the visibility and security of sensitive data, maintaining an array of technology systems governing the handling of data, and compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other privacy legislation. And that’s just for starters.
Whether you realize it or not, sysAdmins are the core of every organization. We mustn’t overlook their efforts and should be empowering them with the tools and resources they need and deserve. Organizations need to make sure they are investing in the right technology – but more than that, they need to make sure they’re investing in their SysAdmins.â€
3. Keepers of the Safety Net
JG HeithcockOpens a new window , GM, RetrospectOpens a new window “Over the past year we were reminded time and again how much we should recognize our SysAdmins. Besides their virtually numerous traditional responsibilities, we continue to see how so many of them have risen up to indefatigably fight the ever-growing ransomware threat with smart strategies designed not only to sidestep, but to recover – swiftly, efficiently, cost-efficiently, and completely from such dark attacks.
Currently top cloud providers offer object-locking (i.e. immutable storage or WORM). System Admins can mark objects as locked for a chosen timespan, preventing them from being altered or deleted. They can then layer on a back-up solution, which has been engineered to blend seamlessly with this new object-lock element to create irreversible backups. And, with robust policy-based scheduling to forecast when those backups will exit the retention, they know their company would always have “point-in-time†back-ups for business continuity – while shunning the necessity of paying a single cent in ransom. For this and myriad other reasons, we are reminded today why System Admins have eventually emerged from the shadows and have taken their befitting place among the highly appreciated heroes of our tech departments.â€
Read More: IT Admins: Make the Leap to the Cloud With Domainless Architecture
4. Gatekeepers of IT Resilience
Gijsbert Janssen van DoornOpens a new window , director, product management, ZertoOpens a new window “The sysadmin’s role is arguably one the most important in any business. They are directly responsible for the uptime, performance, and security of the systems they manage, all of which the entire business relies upon. It’s no mean feat, but the best thing a sysadmin can do for your business is keep you online – and prevent outages. In some ways, they are the gatekeepers of IT resilience, so it’s important to recognize the role they play.
It’s a tough job and, when things are going right, it is easy to overlook the critical work they do. Most systems administrators are all too familiar with the middle-of-the-night call to come in and fix things when the systems mysteriously go down. Organizations looking to support their sysadmins should ensure that they are spending and investing enough on resilient infrastructure – across backup, disaster recovery, and cloud mobility. This will allow your sysadmins to focus on building and managing systems for always-on and agile services, rather than constantly fighting to get the systems back online.â€
5. Optimizers of Infrastructure
Alex ChircopOpens a new window , Founder and CEO, StorageOSOpens a new window Companies need admin services to be available to their customers at any given moment. The role of the sysadmin has been to support the infrastructure by ensuring that its applications are properly maintained. Transitioning to a cloud-native solution can make the life of a sysadmin much more comfortable. Kubernetes offers fast failover, scalability, a platform-agnostic approach, and resource efficiency to sysadmins and provides them fewer issues to deal with. With Kubernetes rising, sysadmins can make sure a business’s infrastructure is managing heavy workloads at a faster pace than before. SysAdmin day exists as a reminder to appreciate one of the hardest working professionals behind a workstation.
How are you planning to recognize and celebrate the unique achievements of your system admins this SysAdmin Day? Share it with us on LinkedInOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , or FacebookOpens a new window .