A Day In The Life Of... (Kieran - IT Systems Administrator)

Most days begin at our office in Hitchin, where I am greeted by our big monitoring screen and hoping that it is displaying a solid block of green alerts, which usually means a good start to the day.

These tests monitor everything from amount of free disk space in servers we maintain to the status of clients Internet lines at their office. At the time of writing it has performed just under 3 million checks in the last 7 days.  This alerting often allows us to speak to a customer on the phone to advise them of an issue before they realise themselves, meaning the issue can be dealt with as quickly as possible. This is the first part of the daily checks we do, where in addition we have a general check over servers we maintain and systems we look after.

We balance doing all of these checks with providing support to clients as and when they contact us throughout the day, whether it be by phone, email, or online chat. 95% of issues are resolved remotely via screen sharing or over the phone, but it is nice to occasionally get out and about and visit clients in person when the need arises. I’ve found that during my very nearly 4 years here that no 2 days are the same.

Recently, I have been given the responsibility of focusing more on project based work. So far, this has included a number of email and file data migrations, where we have moved customers from using on premises servers to cloud based solutions. These projects take a lot of planning, which is something I enjoy doing and is always varied due to the different customer requirements for each specific project. For one particular email migration last year we migrated over 1.3 million emails!

We generally schedule the ‘cutover’ to a new system to take place on a Friday evening to minimise disruption. This usually involves a few hours work on a Friday evening and then a visit to the client on Monday morning to iron out any small issues that may arise.

Away from work, I am a season ticket holder at Luton Town so attend games regularly at weekends. This does sometimes feel like more of a chore than a hobby of late! A weekday evening usually consists of watching some kind of football match on TV or catching up with a TV series on Netflix. A trip to the pub on a Saturday evening is always welcome as well…