Shifts Suggest Traditional Admin Roles Changing Dramatically
A really big change is hitting the Microsoft system admin space in a recent departure from the teams. (Read more about it here – the departure of Wally Mead). The reason this is so critical and interesting involves a few things that seem to me to be coming together.
First, the change to the sysadmin tools team is significant. As you’ll see at the jump, Mead is instrumental and a long-time key component of that group. but this is really interesting when you think about Microsoft’s stated direction over the last couple of years – that of bringing many enhancements and updates to the cloud first, then stand-alone apps and systems second.
Clearly it seems that Microsoft is seeing the move to the cloud as the key choice of direction. It makes sense with their offerings with Azure and the different providers having excellent success in providing Microsoft systems in that way.
I think too though that this shift is extremely important for system administrators. I know, I know. We’ve been saying that job responsibilities are changing for quite some time. But it’s getting clearer now where that line will increasingly be. I think that back-end administration work is going the way of Windows XP. It’s just not smart to hang your hat on that being your only responsibility and expertise set in the medium and longer-range timeframe.
Architecture, performance tuning, BI, etc. – these are much smarter plays when it comes to managing your career. The essentials at the core of systems admin – the computers, hardware, even some basic essential processes that can just be provided as part of the environment on these cloud hosting provider’s platforms… you just have to start making the assumption that these will simply be there and not something you have to worry about. Or base your job on.
It’s not going to happen tomorrow, but it will most certainly happen before you expect. Start working to supplement these responsibilities now. Not later.