System Administrator Appreciation Day 2020

SIM-Networks
3 min readJul 31, 2020

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The last Friday of every July, the Sysadmin’s Day, is the best day when you can and have to congratulate those people who makes your company’s work possible — by their job.

So, you have a brilliant opportunity to reach it on July 31, 2010, — when the Global IT community celebrate the System Administrator Appreciation Day!

SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS ARE SUPERHEROES OF NOWADAYS!

Hey, you know it — you’re coming to the office, start your laptop or PC, open your used programs for working, send an email to potential client, launch a skype conference with partners, upload a project plan to the corporate intranet storage, fill the new customer’s profile at the CRM system… All your job is connected to IT systems and computers, those are well-organized, interconnected, secured from outside intruders and reliably stored your data. But for your possibility doing your job, system administrators of your enterprise do their job. Those are people who response to the business workability and, finally, profit.

Like others occupations, system administration has some specializations:

  • system engineer (infrastructure engineer, system architect), the person who designs, builds, scales up the corporate information infrastructure by installing and interconnecting in the context of the business processes operating systems, DBMS, directory services, mail and web servers, groupware, CRM, ERP, document management systems, etc.;
  • network administrator, the expert who develops and maintains intracorporate information networks and their connection to the Internet, configures routing and VPN, understands the intricacies of the physical construction of networks and network protocols;
  • database administrator, the wizard who knows how and why the DBMS are arranged, is fluent in SQL, maintains the company’s database and believes in the Force of Backup (by the way, what types of backups are available and in what cases they are used, we told in the material Backups: the most effective methods for various activities);
  • Web server administrator, the lord of the web servers’ realm, in his (or her) power are hardware and software installation, configuration, maintenance; he/she can configure apache and mail servers, and aware of the OSI model and TCP/IP protocol stack;
  • network security administrator, the one who is burdened with information security responsibility (we told about it in the article Corporate cybersecurity: How to defend information values), and writes policies and regulations, keeps computers and networks activity monitoring, controls updates of antivirus and antimalware software, develops preventive measures against cyber threats;
  • mail server administrator, the person who configures and maintains corporate mail servers, installs spam filtering, integrates mail with the database, and can even explain the difference between SMTP and DNS and SSL.

WHAT IS THE BEST GIFT TO SYSADMIN?

You can find a lot of answers on this hard question in the Internet. As a rule, many gift websites offer various mugs and cups, USB-gadgets, flash drives and even toys — for example, a plush penguin for the Linux administrator is for some reason considered to be a very appropriate gift ;)

Ted Kekatos offers the following Gifts list:

  • Parties, Munchies, Refreshments
  • Cake and Ice Cream party
  • Punch and Pie party
  • Cookies or Brownies. Preferably home-baked, and did I say chocolate?
  • Specialty Food Basket, or Gourmet Chocolates, or Fruit Basket
  • Energy beverages to keep them going as they work on your problems
  • Case of Bawls or Monster
  • Case of Iced Mocha Cappuccino or Frappuccino
  • Case of Mountain Dew or Dr. Pepper
  • Bottle (or even a case) of their favorite beer or wine
  • Tickets for Baseball or Hockey, or Basketball, or Football
  • Gift certificates (ThinkGeek, Cafepress, Amazon.com, etc.)

Some system administrators joke that they are quite satisfied a paid day-off as a gift. But we know that the real admin does not have any day-offs, or holidays, or vacations — otherwise he would not have become what he became. ;)

He has his own sympathies, priorities and wishes, he conscientiously responds to any of yours “I need help!” and tries to solve all problems effectively. Therefore, the main gift that should be given to him, regardless of the professional holiday is your polite attention: “thank you”, “you helped me a lot”, “you are a great professional”. For all of us is important to win acceptance among our associates as a person, as a professional, as a human.

Dear System Administrators, happy your Professional Day, and thank you for your work!

More articles and information about this day and its story you can learn at our blog’s article.

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SIM-Networks

Business-oriented IT infrastructure services. Pre-made & custom IT infrastructures based on servers and clouds in European data centers.