Recognizing the Hard Work of IT Professionals on IT Pros Day

National IT Pros Day is an annual event observed on the Third Tuesday in September. On the occasion, five heavyweight IT professionals and industry analysts spoke to us about the seismic shift in IT operations and networking infrastructure.

But, first, a quick overview of what’s IT ecosystem is facing today.

IT DevOps teams are exploring new ways to gain clear visibility into orchestrated serverless workflows in each step as well as through the entire process. New capabilities like Serverless architectures, Virtualization and Containerization have simplified the way organizations operate and scale applications in the Cloud. To meet challenges, IT professionals are putting immense hard work in leveraging technologies and collaborations to resolve IT-related issues faster and ensure the performance of critical serverless applications in the Cloud.

As the pandemic continues to shine a light on issues for IT pros, it’s important that the industry recognize the hard work of teams spent putting out the fires and ensuring systems run smoothly. This was especially true of the mass transition over to remote work in March and the adjustments organizations have made over the past six months.

As organizations continue to face threats from natural disasters such as wildfires and hurricanes, and they continue to see increased cyber attacks as a result of a remote workforce, IT pros are there to keep company and end-user data secure, allowing business operations to continue through difficult times.

This year, IT pros may be facing new challenges, but their dedication to their roles remains intact and is worth celebrating. Below, five industry experts discuss the importance of recognizing IT pros today.

IT Pros Day Highlights the Need to Adapt with Times and Situations

Richard Hanmaker, HR business partner, Leaseweb Global

“We must applaud our IT pros for exhibiting such strong resilience throughout the constant changes 2020 has brought. With the transition to remote work in the wake of COVID-19, many IT pros have had to adapt their day-to-day while working under atypical conditions.

Throughout the entire pandemic, IT pros have committed to never stop learning. IT pros around the world have learned with each curveball and thus constantly further developing their knowledge and expertise. This commitment to learning, adapting and evolving has allowed them to continue adding immeasurable value for both end-users and customers alike.

As we begin looking toward what comes next, I encourage IT pros to stay curious. Having curious and adaptable team members enables an organization to themselves be adaptable: to challenge an idea, to improve it. These are all mission-critical capabilities in our current economic climate.”

IT Resilience and Disaster Recovery Management Goals Take Precedence Today

Carl D’Halluin, CTO, Datadobi

“The IT department is an organization’s team of modern-day superheroes. In the face of a disaster such as a cyberattack, insider threat, storage platform-specific hack or bug, or natural disaster that disrupts power or network connectivity, it is up to the IT pros to come in and ‘save the day’ to ensure business continuity.

On this year’s IT Pro Day, it is important for businesses to equip their crusaders with the right tools to combat downtime. Downtime can cost an organization roughly $300,000 per hour or $5,600 per minute – which doesn’t include the added impact of reputation damage or loss of customers. By identifying what we call a ‘golden copy’ of mission-critical data and keeping it in a well-protected bunker either on or off-premise or in the cloud, IT pros can rest assured that in the event of an emergency, business operations can continue. The ‘golden copy’ complements data protection plans and allows IT pros to focus on delivering more value to the businesses they serve – further elevating their superhero status.”

Pandemic Crushing IT Goals; IT Professionals Doing More Than What’s Expected of Them

Craig Fulton, Chief Customer Officer, ConnectWise

“The hard work of IT professionals should be recognized each and every day, but they certainly deserve one all their own. From system administrators to network engineers, IT support technicians are crucial to business success and lead the charge for technology innovation. Companies need technology to operate efficiently, be productive, and compete. IT Professionals ensure that the technology is there to keep companies running, productive and to drive them into the future.

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As organizations across industries continue to operate remotely, the support and dedication of IT professionals help to keep businesses safe during this critical time and beyond. IT professionals have become more important as the workforce has seen a 35% increase in IT incident tickets per day. In addition to acting as the backbone of any organization, IT professionals focus their time on protecting businesses from security attacks, troubleshooting and saving the company from productivity-killing downtime.

Initiatives like IT Pros Day allow us to celebrate the vital role of IT professionals and acknowledge the many ways they help organizations achieve their full potential.”

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Cybersecurity, Ransomware and Other IT Threats Looming Large

Mihir Shah, CEO, StorCentric

“IT professionals can sometimes be overlooked, despite just how vital their presence is. This may be due to the fact that the only encounter most people have with them is when IT has gone wrong. What most people forget is that these IT professionals are the backbone of virtually every successful organization and work tirelessly to ensure infrastructure is protected, services are kept running, and their end-users are provided with efficient ways to work.

In today’s pandemic era, remote work has become the norm. With this, IT professionals have had to become extra vigilant as ransomware has also spread viciously. Unfortunately, backups have become the latest malware target, as evolving and more sophisticated ransomware attacks now not only seek to attack onsite production data but also every possible copy, wherever the copies reside.

Ransomware continues to be the biggest threat facing organizations today. IT departments must incorporate a secure solution into their existing infrastructures such as Unbreakable Backup, which protects backups in the event of a ransomware attack and mitigates data loss and downtime. For this reason, and countless others, we at StorCentric wish to honor and celebrate hard-working IT professionals, not only this IT Pro Day, but every day.”

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IT Professionals Need More Support than Ever Before to Come Through in their Workplace

Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Director Technical Marketing, Zerto

“IT Pro Day comes at a poignant time this year, against the backdrop of a world that has changed dramatically in just 6 months. This has brought new and challenging digital environments and with it, greater cybersecurity risks. All organizations, big and small, are now realizing they must prioritize both protection and availability – 24/7/365 – regardless of their perceived level of risk. This can put enormous pressure on IT professionals, whose responsibility it is to ensure the business maintains IT resilience in the wake of any disruption. A huge task, but perhaps even bigger now as many of our IT professionals are doing this job remotely while supporting a growing remote workforce.

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The best thing a company can do this year to support IT pros is to invest in tools that can help them enable IT resilience – combatting downtime once and for all. Ultimately, IT pros need tools that are easy and simple to use, multi-purpose, work across all types of infrastructure, and are ready to adapt to the ever-evolving innovation needs of an organization. This is critical to ensuring IT pros can focus on adding value – ensuring IT is running smoothly, rather than spending precious time recovering from downtime that could have been prevented.”

Thank you everyone for sharing these insights with us! We look forward to seeing you again! 

To share your insights in our Interviews / Sponsored Articles, please write to us at sghosh@martechseries.com