July 27th is the 19th annual International Systems Administrator Appreciation Day (SysAdmin Day). Your system administrators and your entire IT department are the team of dedicated professionals that keep your company’s infrastructure and applications operating, your data secure, and your business processes active, stable, and productive.
On this special day, take some time to show your system administrators you appreciate their hard work and experience.
You could do as other companies do and give your system administrators a novel gift to celebrate SysAdmin Day: cake and ice-cream; pizza; a custom T-shirt; coffee mug; or balloons.
These gestures are great, but they are not enough considering all the hard-work these men and women do for your company every day. Instead, give your system administrators a gift they will appreciate as much as you appreciate them – a modern set of tools to make their job easier and more effective. Best of all, it’s FREE!
Managing the Clutter of Components in your IT Environment
Your SysAdmins are responsible for managing all the parts, pieces, wires, and systems of your IT environment. Although they can work with new and exciting technology, they also have to manage all the older components that have been added to the environment over a period of many years. In addition, these older components are usually fraught with many issues.
For a typical small to medium-size company, it could include hundreds of devices and for a large company, the size of the environment can total tens of thousands of components.
Managing the assets, dependencies, patching levels, and ongoing maintenance to ensure your systems and processes operate efficiently can be a tough challenge – especially if your SysAdmins don’t have a good set of tools.
Responding to Incidents and Outages
What happens when your SysAdmins are called in the middle of the night because a system went down? Do they have the tools to effectively assess the impact and diagnose the cause of the issue?
Your SysAdmins need their sleep too. Give them the tools to troubleshoot incidents and outages efficiently, so they can keep your business operating smoothly and receive the sleep they need.
Modern ITAM and ITSM tools help manage dependencies, support contact data for individual components, and visualize the impact of incidents and outages, so they can be fixed right the first time.
Keeping Current on Patching and Maintenance
What about security and bug alerts from suppliers and information security firms?
With a large number of 3rd party components in use in IT environments today, vendors are continually identifying bugs, security vulnerabilities, and developing enhancements system administrators are responsible for installing in your IT environments.
With the large volume of change notifications received every week, it can be tough for SysAdmins to keep track of what patches must be applied to keep equipment, systems, and processes current. Unfortunately, a backlog of patching can cause performance issues that impact your business users and leave your company vulnerable to malicious attacks from hackers.
Automate Your Discovery
With the right set of tools, like those from Virima, your team will know with certainty your current assets, how they connect, and the status of configurations and important patches.
Virima’s Automated IT Asset Discovery and IT Asset Management (ITAM) solutions provide the capabilities not just to collect information, but also to manage it and display it visually to help your SysAdmins be more effective doing what they do best – keeping the technology operating and your business running smoothly.
