The challenges facing SysAdmins today
Most of the challenges and issues that a system administrator faces today are not really new, but an extension of past trends. In a competitive marketplace, the demands to “do more with less” will never abate. While new technologies can help in some ways, they often bring their own new variations on old problems.
Some clear themes are:
- Ever more moving parts – the number of components in the environment
- Changing legal and regulatory requirements
- Security threats
- Managing product lifecycles & the pace of change
- Keeping the environment flexible
- Stability and resilience
- Personal learning
- Cost control
Ever more “moving parts”
The move to n-tier architectures away from monolithic systems is not new, but has progressed even further with web services and SOA. Some sites have replaced large Unix servers with farms of cheap Linux machines, and clustering for resilience is becoming more common. Virtualisation and grid computing add yet more layers that have to be managed.
Legal and regulatory requirements
Some industries have always had very detailed regulations, for example if it affects public safety. In the financial industries, regulation has been tightening in recent years (e.g. SOX) and there will probably be extensive changes following the market turmoil since 2007.
Most industries have legal requirements for safety, personnel and financial record-keeping at the very least. Emails and other data are now used as evidence in court cases, so even if it is not mandatory to keep them, companies often need to keep records for potential future self-defence.
Security threats
Remember when we worried only about viruses transmitted on floppy disks? Now, the Internet is essential but brings with it a slew of threats from sophisticated criminals; not only viruses, spam and malicious attacks, but the danger that confidential communications with a customer or partner could be intercepted.
As organisations maintain increasingly complex public websites, a carelessly-published file can reveal confidential information. Leaks can also happen (deliberately or inadvertently) through removable storage media or mobile devices. Somebody plugging their personal laptop into your network can steal data, attack your systems, or spread a virus.
The pace of change
Product lifecycles seem to get shorter. Particularly if you have developers working to Agile methods, or if you use open-source products, you may be dealing with apps which have frequent incremental releases rather than traditional upgrades at major versions.
Often, the SysAdmin has to resist ill-considered business demands, with a “boring” insistence on obscure features like the ability to backup and restore data. But you must also be able to help with suggestions for better alternatives, and innovations to facilitate new products.
A flexible environment
As the name “Agile” implies, you have to keep an eye to possible future requirements so that your environment can be adapted quickly and safely when necessary. This might be the introduction of a new application or a new architecture, or a new strategy such as outsourcing or the use of “cloud” resources.
Stability and resilience
IT services to the business have widely varying requirements for uptime – in air traffic control, this might be 100%; for a monthly reporting system, it might well be “so long as it’s up sometime in the first week of the month”. Some systems justify huge investment to restart immediately after a disaster, others could take days to recover without much impact.
Personal learning
In order to keep a proactive approach rather than “running to catch up”, the administrator needs to keep learning. This includes learning about the business - upcoming demands from the market, customers, regulators and so on; development tools and techniques so you can support your development teams; as well as the core technologies you use.
Cost Control
Of course costs are always the fundamental requirement. If IT costs more than the business can afford, you either have to find another way, or the business is no longer viable. Broadly, costs will consist of:
- Hardware
- Software license and support charges
- Space and power
- Personnel
The only “new” aspect of this is that organisations are beginning to notice costs which have traditionally been hidden as “overheads” – space, power and cooling.