There are numerous reasons to appreciate your system administrator ( SysAdmin ). For instance , one of the most challenging aspects about working with technology is oftentimes not so much the technology itself , but rather the relationship between the technology and the people who use it .

It is our SysAdmins who are invariably responsible for making sure that employees can use technology in an efficient , productive and safe manner .

This could certainly be seen during the start of the pandemic , when people were first sent home virtually overnight to work . Many organizations were forced to depend upon their virtual private networks ( VPNs ) for network access and security and then learned the hard way that VPNs were not up to the task .

Savvy SysAdmins however recognized that VPNs simply were not designed or intended for the way we work today . They saw that external and internal bad actors could and were exploiting inherent vulnerabilities in VPNs .

Instead , forward-looking SysAdmins saw there was an answer to the VPN dilemma . It was and still is an innovative and highly reliable approach to networking connectivity – the Software Defined Perimeter ( SDP ).

This approach enables organizations to build a secure software-defined perimeter and use Zero Trust Network Access ( ZTNA ) tunnels to seamlessly connect all applications , servers , IoT devices and users behind any symmetric network address translation ( NAT ) to any full cone NAT : without having to reconfigure networks or set up complicated and problematic VPNs .

With SDP , SysAdmins can ensure safe , fast and easy network and data access . This is of course just one example of countless reasons to appreciate your system administrator .

Bottomline , our SysAdmins play a vital role in ensuring our workforce can leverage technology to help our organizations succeed at the agile and accelerated pace business now demands .

It is our SysAdmins who are invariably responsible for making sure that employees can use technology in an efficient , productive and safe manner .

www . intelligentcio . com INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA 33

Intelligent CIO North America Issue 25 | Page 33

There are numerous reasons to appreciate your system administrator ( SysAdmin ). For instance , one of the most challenging aspects about working with technology is oftentimes not so much the technology itself , but rather the relationship between the technology and the people who use it .