Understanding systems in the business ecosystem

Systems, that is the operating system layer of IT infrastructure, plays one of the most critical roles within IT and the business. In most businesses, most of the most critical aspects of IT functionality tend to fall to the systems roles to oversee. The system administrator is often saddled with tackling security, performance, data integrity, storage, planning, access control, backups, innovation, design, consulting, and so much more. No other role commonly must address all, if even any, of those functions.

For many reasons, system administrators often form the backbone of an IT departmental infrastructure. The operating system, because of its deep roots into storage and networking, and its close association with data and applications, sits in the position with the greatest control and visibility throughout the IT organization. System administrators may have little direct contact with end users but tend to be the nexus around which nearly all the infrastructure and support departments focus and rely.

System administration is generally seen as forming the largest group of focused IT professionals, as well, at least within the scope of purely technical roles. End user touching positions such as helpdesk or deskside support may involve larger headcount, but much of those roles often involves customer service or end user training that accounts for much of their time spent during a day. Within the technical realms of networking, storage, applications, databases, and so forth, it's most likely that systems will represent the largest portion of your team and cover the broadest range of skills.

Being so central, core, and often large, you can think of systems as often functioning as the glue that holds the IT department together; or you can think of systems as being the hub onto which all other IT disciplines will tend to attach. The following diagram demonstrates this:

Figure 1.3 - Systems at the Core of the IT Ecosystem

Unlike networking who might know little or nothing of systems, for example, systems professionals cannot be unfamiliar with networking concepts, even extremely detailed ones. Or unlike a database administrator who can generally just assume that someone else will handle backups properly, the system administrator is often the comprehensive point of communications that must understand how the database is talking to storage, how storage is quiescing data, and how a backup is being decoupled from the system. Just as the operating system is essentially the communications hub of a workload, the system administrator naturally becomes the point of holistic understanding and management of a workload.

In my experience, systems administration often is expected to work as a full consulting peer to other teams. I've seen applications, database, and networking teams all turn to systems departments when they are looking for broader experience within their own realms. The nature of system administrators to have to deeply understand not only their own realm, but all adjacent ones, leads to a department that can often act as a consultant to others, much as how IT often does so to the business at large.

Naturally, system administration gains the greatest overall knowledge of the overall workings of a business from the IT perspective which because it touches nearly every aspect of a business, is often one of the most important views that there can be of an organization. This will lend itself to the system administrator also being in a key role to report on and potentially advise business leaders within the organization as to issues and opportunities. Of all specialized roles within IT the system administrator is the most likely to interact heavily with the business on a large scale.

Now we have a good feel for how our role is going to fit into the IT department and the business. Next, we will learn about to tackle learning this role in the first place.