Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

IT Pro Day has always been about singing the praises of practitioners across the vast spectrum of tech specialties, from network engineers and systems administrators; to infosec analysts and developers; to storage and virtualization admins; and even to monitoring specialists (whether that’s your whole job or just part of a much longer list of responsibilities). But an important question we should consider is what, exactly, prepared you for this career?

The global pandemic continues to fluctuate, but the reliance on IT services and teams to support service continuity in the public sector remains steady. To ensure network operations continue running at peak performance, there are several actions government IT teams can take to consistently maintain a network architecture capable of supporting a remote workforce. IT tools like support tickets and the IT service desk directly support end users and organizational goals.

More personal and proprietary data is available online than ever before—and many malicious actors want to get ahold of this valuable information. Using an intrusion detection system (IDS) is essential to the protection of your network and on-premises devices. Intrusion detection systems are designed to identify suspicious and malicious activity through network traffic, and an intrusion detection system (IDS) enables you to discover whether your network is being attacked.

A year ago, in July of 2020, I started my SysAdmin Day post  with the words, Here we are, 12 months later, and a lot has changed, but life (and tech) continue to be extraordinarily not-normal. The challenges we face as IT pros in general and SysAdmins in particular push us to our limits daily, and there’s no hiding or sugar-coating it. In the face of all this, I’d like to offer some new thoughts for my SysAdmin family to help process the year that was and navigate the challenges to come.

Engineering teams can only be as efficient as the processes they employ during development. The need for increased efficiency is why software development has shifted from the “waterfall” approach to a more responsive, agile methodology. In an agile development environment, quality software can be delivered consistently to suit the ever-changing needs of stakeholders and end users.

Unattended incidents won’t clean up after themselves and will come back to haunt you—whether as rising MTTR metrics, a cluttered Incident Index, fruitless back-and-forth communication, or a declining CSAT score. Powerful automation conditions can drive productivity, save you manual work, and speed up your incident lifecycle management —and keep your employees happy.

In our previous blog, we looked back at the year of transformation that was 2020. To say the last year was a bit hectic—even chaotic at times—would be an understatement. But for many organizations, IT saved the day. IT delivered and enabled technology solutions to keep the business in business.