10 Reasons to be Thankful for Your System Administration Team

Any company big enough to have a system administration team should give thanks to these overworked and often under-appreciated people who keep networks up and running.

Your system administration teams are working around the clock to ensure network operations run smoothly and that your team can access critical applications and be productive in their job functions at all times, even on Thanksgiving Day. Sending a thank you note or email for all their hard work will certainly brighten their day.

Not only do system administrators have to manage the availability and performance of their network but they are also responsible for securing the company’s data, both at rest and as the data moves across networks and global infrastructures. These teams battle human error, network failures, insecure file sharing, cyber-attacks and more to keep data secure.

A recent SpiceWorks survey found that 55 percent of IT pros believe that getting management to understand the importance of IT priorities is going to be their biggest challenge next year. Without management recognizing the importance of IT priorities, chances are slim that they’ll allot the extra budget It administrators need to properly maintain all their responsibilities.

While constant waves of technology transformation have brought greater efficiency to businesses, it has created more responsibility for system administrators to make sure that their infrastructure and IT environments are continuously up to date, available and secure. Additionally, they are responsible for identifying, evaluating and implementing the latest technologies that keep their organizations current in their industries.

Being on call 24/7 is no fun, but system administrators do it all the time, year-round. Teams are available at any time of any day, even in the middle of the night, to solve issues that may pop up at a moment’s notice, even on Thanksgiving Day if necessary, to ensure your network is always up and running efficiently.

System administration teams are responsible for the improvement of network operations to optimize system performance. When network performance problems crop up, System administrators have to work fast to find and fix the problem, because slow or unresponsive systems can incur huge costs, cut revenue or cause compliance issues for businesses.

These teams constantly need to balance the bandwidth needs of critical business apps with the influx of consumer devices connecting to the network including smartphones, wearable technology, laptops and tablets to ensure they can access the network without degrading performance.

Bring your own device is a recent trend that shows how far IT has come in understanding and responding to what employees want and need to be productive in today’s agile business environment. While it’s great for your productivity and flexibility, we should be mindful that this creates a lot more moving parts for system administrators to management when it comes to ensuring mobile devices connect securely to the network and work reliable.

When networks go down, teams need to diagnose and fix the problem quickly. According to a recent study, IT outages cost North American enterprises $700 billion a year, including lost employee productivity, lost revenue, and actual costs to fix the downtime issues.

System administrators are responsible for creating and enforcing the policies that users need to follow so that no disruptions occur on the networks. One of the most common reasons that employees engage in activities that put their data at risk is a lack of clear IT policies and enforcement but luckily, the administrators keep users n check and sensitive data secure.