What can dismissed admin?

Yes for everything! Especially if we are talking about a small enterprise, where the admin is one and is responsible for everything that is at least somehow connected with computer equipment. In other words, if the duties of an employee are not clearly indicated in his employment contract, he can be dismissed for an idle coffee maker – she’s program-controlled!

Imagine for a second that the management is adequate, people are not registered in the mental hospital, and the duties of the administrator are clearly defined in the employment contract. Then, for a non-working coffee maker, of course, they will not dismiss him, but there are a lot of other reasons.

1. Dismissal for sclerosis or in time did not pay for the Internet, hosting, services of a cloud provider, domain, etc

In small organizations where there is only one administrator, he is also responsible for the payment (more precisely, for the timely provision of invoices to the accounting department) of all IT services that are provided by third parties. In time, you did not pay for the services of the cloud provider or forgot to extend the domain – this may serve as a reason for dismissal since a non-working site can damage the company’s reputation and wallet.

The online store does not make a profit, not to mention the dangers of reputation – in fact, often if the service is not paid, visitors to the site will receive a shameful message that the service has not been paid. This is even worse than the situation when the server “just fell.”

But when assessing financial harm, one article of “ruin” is often forgotten: after a site’s downtime for any reason (did not pay for the domain, hosting, or simply the site “fell”) for 1-2 days, it will seriously lose its position in search engines. The face of the SEO-person will either shine with joy (if he works for himself) or turn pale with horror (if he is on staff and works “at the rate”) – after all, restoring positions will have to spend a monthly budget for SEO.

Here we can advise the administrator, was not fired for multiple sclerosis:

• To collect information about all third-party It services that are paid regularly (date of last payment, the frequency of payment, the name of the organization with its details, login to the personal account):

• • Renewal dates of domains
  • Hosting services, the cloud provider
  • When to pay for Internet, updates, etc.

• Schedule in Google calendar or in any other convenient scheduler.
• To configure event notification so that the calendar warned at least a week — that is enough.

2. Don’t have time to make the backup

To configure the backup system is the first thing that must be done by the admin. Any normal admin with this and starts its activities, but there are nuances:

• Inefficient backup schedule – this is when a backup as it is, it is not relevant. Critical information you need to back up at least once a day – at the end of the day or night. You can do backups several times a day if it is technically possible (for example, some DBMS need to stop at the time of backup, in theory, you can do this at lunch, but not always – if we are talking about the Internet store, you don’t want to, so he was unavailable at this time).
• Damage most reserve copy – here admin copied-copied and when it came to recovery, was corrupted backup itself because the screw was in NAS disk with beaten sectors. Critical information (for example, 1C database) you need to copy to multiple media, and even better – in the cloud. In this case, you can protect data not only from the exit from the system drive but also from natural disasters and other emergencies like fires – its data center, as a rule, is far from the office.

3. Disrupted the delivery period of the equipment

Server 1C inhibits needs something to solve. I decided to order a new server and it did not come in time for one reason or another – no matter what form the admin here a little that depends, extreme still. Because of the servers, he says, and the new server didn’t come for another report, and the old brakes, or even “lay down” under load.

What can you advise: go to the cloud – everything is here. The allocation of resources (i.e. “supply” of the new server or upgrading an existing one) takes just minutes – not only will you have time to report “to put the” new server, but to transfer the data from the old. Oh and don’t forget that the resources you can always “return” to save if they are temporarily not required.

4. The site crashed – admin fired

Sites sometimes fall down. The reasons for the fall can be anything from misconfiguration of the server services, to an insufficient number of resources that the admin had to allocate to the server or to add resources to the control panel, virtual server, or buy a physical iron.

If the site lies a short time (say several minutes), the administrator, of course, you’re not. But the probability of dismissal is proportional to the time of the “fall” of the website. Not the performance of the website for more than a day is cause for dismissal.

What can you advise the admin:

• To configure monitoring of the site to “fall” first to know, not from management. Here you can use or your own monitoring services like Zabbix or third-party services (Yandex. Metric, HostTracker, etc.)
• To configure the service monitor similar to the critical site services (the web server and server database) are automatically restarted after they are stopped or another event (for example, the service can “hang” his process will work, but requests the server will stop responding – in this case, a useful service to restart). It is not a panacea, but a good crutch. Sometimes it is impossible to say exactly why a site falls on the search for the cause takes time, but all this time the site should work – even lame, but it works. At least until the admin will look for the cause of the failure, it will not be fired.

5. Failure of equipment resulting in lengthy downtime

Here we’re not talking about work some a specific server, but on the whole business-critical equipment in the area of responsibility of the administrator. For example, if the admin is responsible for PBX and it’s not working for a long time, it may be cause for dismissal.

Recommendations are pretty straightforward: you need to ensure that all the equipment worked. The piece of equipment can be migrated to the cloud (e.g., the same servers, network storage, etc.). Yes, you will have to persuade the leadership to move to the cloud, but this will significantly relieve the shoulders of the admin now have to pull burdens have admins cloud provider – they will make sure that all services were available 24/7. And the admin will have more free time that can be spent on other tasks – to repair the same PBX or so be it – coffee 🙂