Improving a Company’s IT Infrastructure as a SysAdmin— Non-profit Company (Part III)
Hello!
This is the final post of the series Improving a Company’s IT Infrastructure as a System Administrator. This series was inspired by Google IT Support Professional Certificate — System Administration and IT Infrastructure Services section. You can check part II here.
If you haven’t read my previous post, just to give you some introduction, in the final project of the course, we are requested to provide consultation as a system administrator. Here, I make public how I would approach the pain points of this fictional company.
Once again, feel free to think about how you would tackle this scenario and share with me your thoughts. There is always room for improvement.
Non-profit Company
Dewgood is a small, local non-profit company of 50 employees. They hired you as the sole IT person in the company. The HR person tells you when they need a new computer for an employee. Currently, computers are purchased directly in a physical store on the day that an employee is hired. This is due to budget reasons, as they can’t keep extra stock in the store.
The company has a single server with multiple services on it, a file server, and email. They don’t currently have a messaging system in place. When a new employee is hired, you have to do an orientation with them for login. You’re also responsible for installing all the software they need on their machine, and mapping the file server to their computer. The computers are managed through Windows Active Directory. When an employee leaves, they’re currently not disabled in the directory service.
The company uses an open-source ticketing system to handle all internal requests as well as external non-profit requests. But the ticketing system is confusing and difficult to use, so lots of the employees reach out to you directly to figure out how to do things. In fact, so many things are difficult to find that employees typically ask around when they have a question.
There are nightly backups in place of the file server. You store this information on a disk backup and take it home with you every day to keep it safe in case something happens onsite. There’s also a small company website that’s hosted on the single server at the company. This website is a single HTML page that explains the mission of the company and provides contact information. The website has gone down many times, and no one knows what to do when it happens.
My answer:
The company is using Active Directory (AD) so it is possible to use Group Policy to install all the software automatically into the computers without the need to do that manually. Also, as AD is being used, it is easy to disable and delete old employees from the directory service if the system is organized properly. In fact, this is a must as not disabling an old user from the system will only cause more people in the software and for security reasons, this should not happen.
Furthermore, the messaging system for internal communication must be improved. The ticketing system could be let only for external non-profit requests and another system used for handling internal requests. For example, Slack can be adopted to handle internal requests and communication purposes. This application provides the option of dividing topics by channel, therefore, channels can be created and granted access to those who are needed.
Besides that, easy-to-read documentation must be provided for employees with the most frequent questions to help them understand Slack and the ticketing system used. Then, in case doubts still remain, emails or Slack channels can be used to ask questions and concentrate all information in one single place. Also, educational training can be provided for employees, and the new joiners can have access to the same training by watching a recorded video. However, if doubts are not solved they can use the Slack channel to ask their questions. Gathering all people in the same place helps because one question might be the doubt of the other one, and as a system administrator, I can answer all the questions and control if others are giving misinformation while they try to help.
Regarding the backup process, it is good to have one more way to save the data. Disks are not the best choice as they can be corrupted or lost for instance. Using the cloud to store more critical data will be one of the best solutions if after further evaluation the budget allows that.
Moreover, someone responsible for handling websites could be contacted for a consultation to plan a better solution for hosting this. Again, cloud services would be a good solution as hosting a website on a cloud service might avoid downtime. Sometimes, the traffic on the website might be causing the page to go down and the Auto Scaling feature included on cloud services will help avoid these things from happening.
Thank you for reading.
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