The work of a network administrator is associated with many difficulties. Unfortunately, it is impossible to describe them all in one article – the principle “it is impossible to grasp the immensity”.
The work of a network administrator is associated with many difficulties. Unfortunately, it is impossible to describe them all in one article – the principle “it is impossible to grasp the immensity”. Therefore we decided to reveal some aspects of the work of a network administrator in a company which is not connected to IT. That is not a system integrator or a software company with DevOps, QA and other helpful departments or anything similar. In this article, we’ll limit ourselves to a certain segment that doesn’t make money from IT.
We’ll talk about the hard stuff, such as creating a certain mindset in supporting IT infrastructure, segregating duties, following the job description and moving to remote work.
To better understand what the position of “network administrator” is, let’s look at the process of its emergence in the company.
Initially, a small firm quite manage the services of a single system administrator, sometimes in the role of the administrator coming.
The network is small, the computers are few, partly using cloud servers, some kind of their own NAS for backups, in general, the business somehow manages to survive.
Time passes and one “multi-armed shiva” is no longer enough for all the infrastructure maintenance tasks. The company management thinks about hiring a second “IT guy”. Often the impetus for this decision is the need to give a legal vacation to the only system administrator.
A second person appears in the IT department, not necessarily with the same knowledge set and job description, for example, this can be a techsupport specialist, a 1C programmer, a web programmer, etc. As you have time to notice, this is not yet a network administrator. Because the network is not so large yet, and the efforts of the server (not network) sysadmin is quite enough to keep it afloat.
Interesting trend
It is common practice when network management is initially hinged on anyone. For example, on the system administrator, or even on the programmer 1C. The results of this “delegation of network authority” is not difficult to predict.
The position of “network engineer” usually appears when the business has already grown decently, rose to his feet, and he needed a developed network. That is, his system administrator, his engineer and even a programmer is already recruited and shared responsibilities, but for the network administrator is quite a specific list of jobs.
The need for a network administrator appears in one of two reasons:
The company’s network has grown large enough that there aren’t enough employees to maintain a large infrastructure.
The company’s network has become more complex, security requirements have risen, which has increased labor costs and required additional expertise.
And now, after all the twists and turns, the company has an employee whose job will be to take care of the computer network. But do not hurry to rejoice, there are still a lot of interesting things ahead.
Who and how determines the duties of a network administrator
From the standpoint of the network administrator, he is responsible for operating and monitoring the network, advises on the configuration of client equipment, performs firmware updates and makes backups of configurations on time. Sometimes this is supplemented by advice on purchasing and accounting for existing units of network equipment.
Unfortunately, very often the management does not understand how serious demands set to the network administrator by life itself and how much work he has to do to maintain the proper level of skill.
People, little related to IT, continue to evaluate the work of IT experts on the Soviet principle of “plan-o-volu – val-o-planu”, that is, by the primitive quantitative indicators. For example, a server engineer installed and configured a huge blade system, plus a storage system consisting of a controller and several disk “shelves”. Such work is immediately visible to the naked eye. And if you add a tape library the size of half a server rack – that’s even cool!
And try to prove under such circumstances that these “little boxes” called gateways, routers, switches and access points require no less configuration effort than the “wealth” described above. Alas, not the “scale of accomplishment”.
And where there is no understanding, there is a persistent desire to “add to the missing amount of work to be done”. For example, to plant in the job description of the network administrator points about the management of servers. Why, because the servers are connected to the network? And the workstations are also in the network?
