personal<IT>y: "These are the systems on which the company's operations depend," says an IT administrator about the invisible work without which the company cannot move

In the series of personaly interviews, we continue with a look behind the scenes of IT from the perspective of the people who ensure that a company’s technological environment functions reliably, predictably, and without unnecessary noise. This time, we are not looking at solution architecture, but at their day-to-day operation – the quiet, systematic work of an administrator that becomes fully visible especially when something goes wrong.

An administrator is not just a “guardian of servers.” It is a person who constantly monitors the state of critical services, can read signals before they turn into incidents, and is able to connect technical details with the practical functioning of the company. In the interview, we talk about what a typical day of an administrator looks like, what lies behind terms such as availability, backup, or security, why the cloud is still a scare factor for many companies, and why today one of the biggest challenges is not technology, but the human factor.

Among the administrators is also Peter, who understands IT as a service with clear responsibility and an ethical dimension. His approach can be compared to Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer science, who worked with the most complex systems of her time but always insisted that technology should be understandable, reliable, and under human control. Just as Hopper laid the foundations of modern software thinking, Peter today creates and maintains an environment in which others can work without having to think about everything that is happening in the background.

A network administrator’s morning: what must work

Let’s start with what your typical working day looks like. What is the first thing you do in the morning?

Like most people, I turn on my computer, go through my emails, and check what has happened since yesterday. First of all, I deal with things that already had priority the previous day – unfinished tasks, ongoing changes, planned interventions.
At the same time, I have monitoring tools that immediately show me the status of critical services. These are things that must not stop: emails, system login, Teams, key internal applications. If any of these do not work, it is a problem that immediately goes to the top of the list.

What are the most important things you need to address first thing in the morning? Are there any “red flags”?

Yes, I have alerts set up for critical states. When a service goes down completely, the system records it and sends me a notification. If email is not working for one person, it is unpleasant, but it can be resolved gradually. However, if email is not working for the entire company, I usually find out very quickly – not via email, but because my phone starts ringing.

So you have to keep your mobile with you at all times. Even at home?

Yes. A network administrator is not a typical “eight to four” person. When I receive an SMS or a push notification about something under my management, I at least check what is happening. An immediate intervention is not always necessary, but I need to know whether it is a critical situation or just a minor issue that can wait until morning. These are systems on which the company’s operation depends – they simply cannot rest.

When email goes down for the entire company

You mentioned critical situations. Have you experienced something you had to resolve immediately?

Fortunately, no extreme scenarios where “the entire company would be shut down for a long time.” But common incidents that need to be resolved immediately happen regularly. For example, recently one customer had an outage of their mail server. For a company that communicates almost everything by email, it is an immediate problem: suddenly you have no way to handle orders, customers, or internal communication. At that point, everything else is set aside, and until we find the cause, we deal only with that.

What does your work look like in such moments?

It is a combination of technical intervention and coordination. First, I need to quickly find out whether the issue is on the customer’s side, in the infrastructure, the internet connection, or, for example, an update error. At the same time, I have to communicate clearly: people need to know whether the problem is local or affects the entire company, whether they should try to use the system or rather wait.

So besides managing internal systems, you also handle things for customers?

Yes. I started in customer support and took care of the technical infrastructure of small and medium-sized companies. The technologies our customers used are also used internally in our company, so gradually I moved from the “external” world more toward internal systems. Today, we have more junior colleagues who take care of daily operations for customers, and I help them with more complex issues.

But you kept some customers for yourself?

Yes, the oldest ones. We have known each other for more than fifteen years. It is a pleasant refreshment so that I am not only “inside the company,” but occasionally also among people outside the company, in their real environment, where IT is not the goal, but only a tool for work.

What the job of an administrator actually means

What exactly falls under your responsibility?

One large part is the management of Active Directory, which is the system that, with every login, decides whether your computer allows you access to company services. It is essentially the company’s digital gatekeeper: it knows who you are, what permissions you have, and what you are allowed to use.

Then there is backup, whether of data, servers, or infrastructure. Simply put: we make sure that everything important can be restored in case of problems.

I am also responsible for services such as Teams, Office 365, and other internal applications that run on our infrastructure or in the cloud.

And finally, multi-factor authentication, meaning two- or multi-step verification. That is when you receive an SMS or an app notification during login. It is another barrier that protects the account even if someone finds out your password.

It sounds like you are more in services than in hardware.

Exactly. In the past, I visited customers more often in person, connected cables, dealt with servers and routers. Today, the market is moving toward hardware being just a means. What matters are the applications and services running on it. Customers have become used to many things being handled remotely. Instead of driving somewhere, I perform the intervention through remote management, and it is faster for them as well.

Why the cloud is a scare factor for companies

You mentioned the transition to Office 365. Was that your biggest project?

It was among the bigger ones. I had carried out migration to Office 365 for customers several times, so when it came to internal deployment, it was a natural task for me. Everything had to be planned, prepared, thought through in terms of how each user would be affected by the change, and then maintained. A large part of this work is close to project management – it is not just “clicking one button.”

How do you perceive companies’ transition to the cloud?

For a long time, many companies had their own mail server somewhere in a server room. Typically Microsoft Exchange, people were used to it, they knew they “had email at home.” However, Microsoft decided that this type of solution would no longer be supported for small customers and is pushing them toward the cloud.

Some customers moved to the cloud relatively smoothly, others preferred to change technology just to avoid going there. The reason is often fear: where will our data be, who can access it, how is it controlled. It is understandable. We understand it too; on one hand, I understand the customer, on the other hand, I also understand the technical arguments of cloud solutions.

For laypeople, it is good to know that the cloud is not a “magical space somewhere in the air,” but real data centers with a high level of security. At the same time, it is not a good idea to blindly “hand everything over” and not monitor how services are configured.

IT as a detective story

When you talk about everything you monitor, is your work more reactive or proactive?

It is a combination. I have to react when something breaks – that is the reactive part: something has failed, it is not working, it needs to be fixed. But at the same time, it is expected that we prevent many problems precisely by being proactive: planning, updating, monitoring. The ideal state is when the user notices nothing. Systems are updated, changed, configured in the background, and everything works.

What does that look like in practice?

We have the basics automated. Systems generate logs, which are records of what is happening: what is starting, what is failing, what is behaving unusually. These logs are overseen by a monitoring system. When anomalies start to appear, we receive a notification.

An anomaly might be, for example, disk space disappearing quickly. This can happen on a server or on a local computer. It means something is storing a huge amount of data there or error logs are accumulating. Sometimes it is a faulty service, other times a process behaving differently than it should. And then you start investigating.

So it really is a bit of a detective story?

Yes. You only have fragments of information, a system message, a user complaint, a strange curve on a graph, and from that you have to piece together a story: what happened, why it happened, and how to prevent it next time. It is not always possible to find the cause immediately, but that logical challenge is very interesting in this job.

Can you recall any internal “detective” incident?

Yes, a funny one. One colleague had an issue with his account being locked at random times, several times a year. He was working, and his account would lock. We unlocked it; sometimes it would lock again immediately, sometimes after a longer time. After a few days it stopped, so we thought the problem was resolved. A few months later, again. We were looking for some regular pattern or action that triggered the lock.

In the end, we found out that the colleague had an old phone at home that his son used when he returned from abroad. In one of the apps on the phone, old credentials were saved, and when the app started, it attempted to log in and locked the account. So an old forgotten phone managed to cause quite a mess. It was like a small IT detective story with a surprising ending.

The worst-case scenario: ransomware

We mentioned common incidents. What about the worse scenarios?

The worst-case scenario is a ransomware attack. Ransomware is malicious software that runs through a system, encrypts data, and leaves behind a message: pay, or the data is lost.

Fortunately, our internal environment has not experienced anything like that. A customer has. We discovered it when some files suddenly could not be opened and had strange extensions. The user was unable to access them. We immediately began searching for the computer where the attack originated, disconnected it from the network, treated it, and in most cases had to reinstall it.

What is your role in that?

First of all, antivirus and security mechanisms should intervene – that is the first line of defense. If they fail or the attack bypasses the protection, then it is our turn. I handle the technical part: shutting down systems, isolation, restoring from backups. A security specialist analyzes what exactly happened, where the attack came from, what the impacts are, and what measures need to be taken to prevent it from happening again.

In the case of the mentioned customer, fortunately, central backups were available, so they did not lose important data. Only the contents of the specific person’s local computer were lost, as it was not part of the central server backup. That is a tough lesson: you realize that what is not backed up is as if it never existed.

How a surveyor became a network administrator

It sounds like a job where many things cannot be learned from books. Were you always close to IT?

Probably yes, but it was not exactly a childhood dream. When I started secondary school, I got more exposure to computers for the first time and it caught my interest. Over time, I became “the computer guy.” When someone needed something, they came to me, and I tried to solve it.

Interestingly, I originally studied geodesy in secondary school and later at university at the Faculty of Civil Engineering, majoring in Water Management. I wanted to work with GIS (Geographic Information Systems). At that time, map digitization was a big trend. Maps are nice images, and some of them contain a lot of information.

After several years, however, this trend gradually began to decline, map systems became more automated, and I think that over time GIS operators are being, or already are being, replaced by artificial intelligence.

I got into IT indirectly. During my civil service, I became friends with a colleague who was responsible for computer administration. He saw that I spent more time around computers than others and started calling me for help. When he went on vacation, I filled in for him.

My first “proper” position was supposed to be a GIS operator, but since I again gravitated more toward computers, I ended up as an administrator. And from that moment on, I have been fully in IT.

To what extent does school prepare a person for what you do?

School provides a theoretical foundation, logical thinking, procedures, a way of reasoning. But the real work of a network administrator is largely about practice. Some things can be passed on from colleagues; some you have to “live through.” When someone comes from school and IT interested them beyond the curriculum, it is easier to work with them. If they see it only as a job that ends at four, it is more difficult. Ideally, it is largely also a hobby. The Czechs have an apt word for it: “srdcař” (someone who puts their heart into it).

The ethics of a network administrator: a person who sees everything

Regarding sensitive data: do you think people or companies realize that their network administrator essentially has access everywhere?

In most cases, they do not fully realize it. A network administrator has very broad permissions, can access almost everything, sees how systems function, where data is stored, who uses what. It is a person who has “doors slightly open” to most data. If someone wanted to harm a company, the administrator could be someone they would try to recruit. That is precisely why an administrator must be reliable and responsible.

Do you have any formal “code of ethics” for that?

You could say yes, although it is unwritten. A simple rule applies: if I have access to something sensitive, professionally I should act as if I do not see it, as if I overlook it. An administrator sees a lot, but cannot misuse that information. It is a matter of professionalism.

It is actually the opposite situation compared to journalists: a journalist may not have exact information and may use unverified facts. An administrator may know almost everything, sees the information, or can look it up, but professionalism means not misusing it.

Do you also sign NDAs, confidentiality agreements?

Yes, with some customers definitely, it is standard there. Internal companies sometimes address it within the employment contract. Not all administrators have a separate NDA, but ethically it always applies. The customer must be sure that the network administrator sees their data only to the necessary extent.

Life outside work: forest, cottage, and broken chairs

You mentioned that technology is mentally demanding work. What do you do to relax?

When I am at work, a short coffee break. Outside of work, I like going to the forest. Ideally alone, although with family that does not always work out. I do not seek out tourist highways; I prefer places without people. It is a way to “clear my head.” We also have a cottage that I gradually try to improve. That is my kind of relaxation – to fix something, improve it, make it work and last.

Recently, I bought camping chairs and at first glance it was clear that the most stressed part was made of thin plastic. You tell yourself: this cannot last long. And indeed, after a few uses, the plastic cracked. So I took a rivet gun and tape, replaced the problematic parts, and reinforced the joints. Such “redesigns” make me happy, although it frustrates me a bit that many products today are designed to break quickly just to save a few cents.

Technology is not indestructible: a message for the average user

From your perspective, what are the most common misconceptions of users or companies?

They most often underestimate backups. They feel that technology is reliable and cannot break. Until something happens: a disk stops working, a computer is destroyed, someone accidentally deletes data. Then everyone quickly realizes that backups are critical. And a few months later, when everything is running again, they forget about it.

Users also often believe that “if I have antivirus, I am safe.” Antivirus is important, but it is not a cure-all. A large part of security is about healthy caution: not opening suspicious attachments, not downloading unknown programs, considering how and where you enter your login or other sensitive information.

So what would you advise an average user who is not technical but wants to do the reasonable minimum?

Three simple things:

1. Back up.
   Anything that has value for you – family photos, documents, accounting – should exist in at least two places. Ideally automatically on an external drive, cloud storage, or a company’s central backup.
2. Do not ignore warnings.
   When your computer reports a problem, do not automatically click “close” and “remind me later.” The system is not trying to make your life difficult; it is warning you that something is happening – it could be updates, a security risk, or lack of space.
3. If your computer’s behavior changes, speak up.
   If suddenly everything takes longer, strange windows appear, disk space disappears, or something looks “different than yesterday,” it is better to call a technician sooner rather than later. Many problems can be solved quickly if caught in time.

Technology is reliable only until something breaks. An administrator is the one who tries to ensure that things break as little as possible and that ideally you do not even notice an outage. However, if you want them to do their job as well as possible, you have to help a little – with backups, caution, and by not ignoring the signals that technology gives you.