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I
n today’s digital age, businesses rely
on their technology every day, so when
something goes down it can cause
a major headache. But, in every business
there are those employees who work in the
background, ensuring that every device and
system stays up and running as much as
possible, solving problems quickly if anything
does go wrong. In IT’s case, these people are
known as system administrators and experts
reveal just why they are so commendable.
Boosting SysAdmins through tools
and training
According to Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn,
Technology Evangelist, Zerto, one of the
best ways to support your SysAdmins is by
ensuring that you have the best quality tech
in place to make their jobs easier. He said:
“The SysAdmin is directly responsible for
the uptime, performance and security of
the systems they manage that the business
depends on. 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 recognise the
role they play.
“It’s a tough job and 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. Organisations looking to
support their SysAdmins should ensure
that they are investing enough in 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.”
“SysAdmins have a variety of different
responsibilities but ensuring a businesses’
IT data infrastructure is maintained and
ready to deliver insights and faster time to
value is one of the most important,” said Neil
Barton, CTO, WhereScape. “The role of the
SysAdmin is proving even more crucial as
business needs drive ever increasingly more
frequent changes to data infrastructure,
particularly in the deployment process and
for keeping systems online and operating.
Because of this, as a business, you don’t
want your SysAdmin bogged down trying to
prevent roadblocks. Automation solutions
www.intelligentcio.com
Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Technology
Evangelist, Zerto
can help your SysAdmins by reducing the
time, cost and risk of deploying changes to
data infrastructure by eliminating manual
tasks. SysAdmins can then ensure the data
infrastructure is delivering results.”
Once you have the tech in place, Jon Lucas,
Co-director at Hyve Managed Hosting,
considers the importance of training
SysAdmins to deal with every scenario. He
said: “When it comes to hosting, SysAdmins
are not only central to our business, but our
customers’ businesses too. So, the question
isn’t what do they do for our business – but
rather, what don’t they do. SysAdmins
handle all aspects of IT, keeping systems
up and running and mitigating risks of
downtime, meaning people in this role are
required to have a very broad range of skills
and knowledge. Obtaining and nurturing
talent of this kind is something we take
very seriously as suitable candidates for
the job are often hard to find. Because of
this, we should definitely be taking time to
appreciate all of the work they do, as well as
considering how we can continue to nurture
future generations to ensure that the job is
always lucrative and rewarding.”
Gregg Mearing, Head of Managed Services,
Node4, agreed with Lucas that knowledge
equals power. He said: “SysAdmins fulfil a
vital role that is growing in importance. For
many organisations, the impact of cloud
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