Today is System Administrator Appreciation Day, a day dedicated to recognizing the contributions of the SysAdmin teams who keep our IT services running and businesses online.
Without the contributions of system administrators, businesses and organizations of all kinds would be left floundering. These IT professionals not only keep our hardware and software functional and systems up and running, they also keep our networks safe.
And yet, SysAdmins are often taken for granted and their vital, high-quality services go unnoticed. So, today, we recognize all the hard work SysAdmins do to keep our operations running smoothly.
Richard Orange, Vice President EMEA at Exabeam
“The role of the SysAdmin goes far beyond simply ‘keeping the lights on’. From designing and building technical controls, ensuring visibility and security over sensitive data, to maintaining the company’s compliance with GDPR, CCPA, HIPAA, and other privacy legislation, without the work of our SysAdmin heroes, modern digital businesses would be far from functional. What’s more, their job is getting harder every year.
Challenges now facing SysAdmins include supporting a geographically diverse workforce, while contending with an ever-expanding attack surface and diminishing distinguishable corporate perimeter. And, as organizations become increasingly cloud-focused, SysAdmins are doing a huge amount of the heavy lifting when it comes to migration. Accelerated cloud adoption is also removing some of the previous security controls inherent in provisioning on-premise infrastructure, causing further complexities for our SysAdmins.
Bandwidth, as is so often the case, is now the primary challenge for SysAdmins. We know that without them, any business would cease to operate effectively. We need to be doing everything we can to support them in their role. Even simple practical steps like proper cybersecurity training for all employees and providing the correct, up-to-date tools that can make the world of difference. Going forward, automation will be crucial – helping SysAdmin’s prioritize and automate their tasks wherever possible will be the key to their continued success.”
Terry Storrar, Managing Director, Leaseweb UK
“It’s well known in the IT industry that SysAdmins are the backbone of the organisation. These professionals maintain, upgrade, and troubleshoot office systems, internal networks, firewalls, and routers, to guarantee reliability and quality for end-users. Without their hard work, businesses would quite literally fall to their knees.
At Leaseweb Global, we know the invaluable work SysAdmins do for our organization. In fact, for two weeks each month, every SysAdmin is available on 24-hour call. No matter the day or time, when an issue arises at Leaseweb Global, a skilled sysadmin is quickly available to deal with it.
SysAdmins not only have to contend with day-to-day tasks, they also have to be crisis managers in the event of a natural disaster or cyber attack. In addition to this, they also have to keep up with the latest IT trends, home working and introduction of BYOD – no mean feat by anyone’s standards. When it comes to multitasking and wearing many hats, SysAdmins reign supreme.
On this SysAdmin day, we need to take the time to truly acknowledge and appreciate the incredible work of our SysAdmin heroes. They work tirelessly day in, day out and often with little to no appreciation. Today, and every day after, I want to encourage everyone to recognise our employees for their countless contributions to ensure our internal systems and workstations are running as smoothly as possible”.
Christopher Rogers, technology evangelist at Zerto, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company
“SysAdmins are invaluable when it comes to keeping any business running. At its core, the role of a SysAdmin is to keep your business online—a much more complex and challenging task than it sounds. From maintaining network and computer systems, to overcoming IT disasters, such as major weather incidents or cyber attacks, no business would function if it wasn’t for the vital work of its SysAdmins.
One of the best ways we can help our SysAdmins in their day-to-day tasks is to provide them with all the necessary tools and disaster recovery solutions that allow them to tackle and overcome disasters quickly and with ease. 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. The process of protecting your data by creating an extra copy is one thing, but organizations need a disaster recovery plan that focuses on limiting downtime and restoring operations in minutes or seconds, not days or weeks.
By implementing adequate infrastructure, organizations will free up their SysAdmins to focus on building and managing systems for always-on and agile services, rather than constantly fighting to get the systems back online.”
Mike Gosling, IT service platforms manager at Cubic Transportation Systems
“Whilst SysAdmins are respected within the IT profession, many people do not understand the scope and complexity of their role. High quality IT services are often taken for granted, with the phrase ‘out of sight, out of mind’ proving indicative. Indeed, organizations have a tendency to recognize customer-facing staff more than roles like the SysAdmin, which keep systems running behind the scenes. However without SysAdmins, the services we provide would be seriously compromised. They are responsible for the health, configuration, patching and updating of the systems (databases, servers, network etc.) that underpin the business services that we supply to customers both internal and external.
This is even more so the case in a world of expanding cyberthreats. Our contractual services are based on high availability and high capacity, however these can only be consistently achieved with the good work that SysAdmins do. They are directly winning the customer. Without them, we would more than likely fail our contractual obligations, whilst opening ourselves up for cyberattacks that could have serious repercussions for both our customers and ourselves. On SysAdmin Day and beyond, we should ensure these vital workers are seen, recognized and appreciated for all they do. After all, we’d be lost without them.”
David Miller, SVP Technology, Fluent Commerce
“Sysadmins have evolved into DevOps, cloud, and site reliability engineers (SREs) in the age of the cloud. These individuals are the backbone of organizations by ensuring shipping software is cost-effective, reliable, secure and performant. By converting committed code into value that is delivered to clients, they empower users to have all they need to accomplish their jobs securely. They are the foundation for ensuring that performance and availability are increasing globally. On SysAdmin Day, we are proud to honor their dedication and hard work.”
Steve Cochran, CTO, ConnectWise
“Sysadmins are often the first responders when it comes to addressing problems in IT systems. However, responding reactively is never as effective as taking a proactive approach. By staying ahead of internal or client-based infrastructure issues, it frees sysadmins up to repair IT systems before serious problems occur.
The most experienced sysadmin can struggle to keep up with the demands of modern IT infrastructure, especially with the routine tasks that they are continually being faced with. They are responsible for proactive network monitoring, conducting routine maintenance, managing ticket flow and more. Without the proper software assistance, it can leave IT teams feeling bogged down.
The best thing an organization can do to support its sysadmins is to find the right programs to provide insight into workflows and efficiency while facilitating system response monitoring. This frees up sysadmin to address other, more pressing issues so they are able to be more proactive and handle reactive situations with ease.”
Manu Heirbaut, Vice President of Engineering, Datadobi
“SysAdmin Day serves as a reminder of the importance of the unsung heroes who are the cornerstone of virtually every enterprise IT organization. These professionals are incredibly deserving of gratitude for all the hard work they do to upkeep organizations’ infrastructure every day. Aside from singing their praises on SysAdmin Day, it’s important we provide them with the right tools that can help automate mundane tasks and solve some of the top concerns of enterprises today such as cost, carbon footprint, and business risk issues while maximizing the value provided by unstructured data. Providing sysadmins with purpose-built solutions built for our unstructured-data-driven world can not only elevate their job but also the business as a whole as well.”
Adrian Knapp, CEO & Founder, Aparavi
“On SysAdmin Day, we want to celebrate all of our System Administrators and IT professionals for their hard work and dedication. These individuals are the backbone of every successful enterprise. System administrators not only maintain the functionality of our hardware and software but also maintain the safety of our networks.
It is crucial that SysAdmins and IT professionals are armed with the necessary tools to keep data safe and processes running smoothly. They can best do this through intelligent data management platforms, which assist in the analysis of unstructured data and suggest what data should be kept, deleted, or sorted. SysAdmins can improve their jobs by making data health a priority, which will, in turn, deliver value and safety to every enterprise.”
Surya Varanasi, CTO, StorCentric (www.storcentric.com):
“I have long maintained that demonstrating employee appreciation is not only the right thing to do, but a fundamental cornerstone in creating and maintaining competitive advantage. This has never been truer than it is today, in the face of trends like the ‘great resignation’ and as competition for talent continues to escalate across virtually every job market. Prevailing research backs this up – according to the Pew Research Center, among the top three reasons that U.S. workers left a job in 2021 was “felt disrespected at work.”
System Administrator Appreciation Day provides an ideal opportunity to recognize one of your organization’s greatest assets – its SysAdmins, who are also likely responsible in large part for your organization’s other greatest asset – your data. This responsibility is no easy task, especially given the current global cybercrime climate. Approximately 37% of global organizations said they were the victim of some form of ransomware attack in 2021, according to IDC’s “2021 Ransomware Study.” Likewise, the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reported 2,084 ransomware complaints from January to July 31, 2021. This is a 62% year-over-year increase.
However, smart SysAdmins already know that by deploying an advanced Unbreakable Backup solution they can protect their organization’s data via an immutable, object-locked format which then takes it a step further by storing the admin keys in another location entirely for added protection. Other key capabilities SysAdmins use to their advantage are policy-driven data integrity checks that can scrub the data for faults, and auto-heals without any user intervention. In addition, with dual controllers and RAID-based protection SysAdmins can enjoy high availability protection that can provide data access in the event of component failure. Recovery of data is also faster because RAID-protected disk arrays are able to read faster than they can write. With an Unbreakable Backup solution that encompasses these capabilities, SysAdmins can ease their worry about their ability to recover — and redirect their time and attention to activities that more directly impact bottom-line objectives. And consequently, reinforce their immeasurable value to their organization.”
Brian Dunagan, Vice President of Engineering, Retrospect, a StorCentric Company (www.retrospect.com):
“System Administrator Appreciation Day reminds us how important it is to show appreciation for one of our organizations’ most strategic and valuable assets – the SysAdmin. This is especially true today, given the increasing challenges most SysAdmins need to address on a daily basis.
One such issue most SysAdmins are having to deal with is cyberattacks. Ransomware and other malware continues to hamper businesses and government agencies around the world, locking them out of their operational workflows and then demanding exorbitant payments (after which unfortunately, data is oftentimes never unblocked and/or returned). With the advent of RaaS (Ransomware as a Service), these attacks are becoming even more commonplace, targeting an ever-expanding segment of organizations. It is often the SysAdmin that must enlist the tools necessary to mount a defense, as well as detect early signs of intrusion. And, they need to be able to recover quickly and affordably, should they experience a successful attack. Of course the truth is that today, it is not really a question of if an organization will be successfully breached, but more realistically simply a question of when, making this SysAdmin responsibility all the more crucial. When the SysAdmin is at their best, all of this service is taking place rather transparently, which is why System Administrator Appreciation Day is so important.
Creating a culture of appreciation can take time. So, while System Administrator Appreciation Day officially comes once a year, why not start today, commit to the process and recognize and reward your SysAdmins (as well as the rest of your invaluable workforce) on a regular basis!”
Paul Farrington, chief product officer, Glasswall
“SysAdmins are vital employees – from ensuring that system patches are rolled out on time, to monitoring the performance of all IT systems to ensure they’re working effectively, SysAdmins keep their organisations delivering services to customers. Technology has become such an integral part of society that we need these skilled professionals to dedicate their working hours to maintaining IT systems and keeping the lights on for the rest of the company. However, they can so often go unnoticed because when everything is running smoothly, the wider business does not always realise the amount of work that goes into maintaining the status quo.
“This SysAdmin Day, senior leaders need to recognise the hard work that these employees do. Providing additional training and upgrading the tools they use on a daily basis are just two ways that businesses can show their appreciation for their SysAdmins. These actions will not only help the admins to be more productive and not get held up by tedious manual tasks – it will also help them learn more skills and provide increased opportunities for their career development.”
