7 October, 2024
IT administrator Andy Hendriks is always sharp
Andy Hendriks has been working for our company since early 2022. Together with colleagues Rick and Ewoud, he manages our customers' IT environment from the Arnhem office. This responsible and versatile work fits him like a tailored suit, although that is not the office dress code. Andy is happy to answer some questions to give you an insight into what IT management is all about.
Do you like it a bit in Arnhem?
"Definitely! It is very pleasant here and I learn something new every day. What is also very nice is the short travel time from my home town of Nijmegen. Especially compared to my previous job in Amsterdam."
Were you also an IT administrator there?
"Also. because besides being a web developer, I was the first point of contact for everything IT-related. From servers and workstations to telephony, hardware and licences. Very broad, in other words. When I started at IT Local, I spent the first period discovering where my passion really lies. I worked as a service desk employee, developer and IT administrator. IT management turned out to be my calling after all."
"I find that security side very interesting"
That's still true?
"In the beginning, I did notice that management at IT Local goes a level deeper than I was used to. Especially in the areas of Microsoft Azure, backup processes and virtualisation, I had to expand my knowledge for a while. But that was no problem, because gaining new knowledge and insights always gives me energy. At the moment, I find it very cool when I can start new projects or activities within the company. Sometimes I come up with a suggestion myself, sometimes I am asked, such as recently for supporting our security officer. Great, because I find that security side very interesting, especially the application of security measures."
As an IT administrator, what do you do in a day?
"My day starts in the morning by picking up alerts from our monitoring systems. With our Remote Monitoring and Management tool (RMM), we monitor the IT environment and pretty much everything connected to it for our customers. This tool monitors and enables us to remotely solve problems. Then I check the backups. Were they all successful or, for example, did one interrupt and do we have to run it again? Then I check whether all systems have a working antivirus, check the update process and perform backup-recovery tests.
The rest of the day I spend looking for news about new vulnerabilities, working on my projects and processing customer tickets. And oh yes, I forget to mention that I also create reports, provide manuals and describe procedures."
You won't forget the coffee, will you?
"Tea in my case... ha ha... I definitely take some time for that too. As well as a chat with my colleagues. And of course I don't skip the free lunch either."
How is the collaboration with your immediate colleagues?
"Good anyway! In the office, we sit together and have a lot of personal contact. Of course, we also use Teams. Where Rick is a bit more on networks and firewalls, I am mainly on Microsoft 365, Azure and security. Ewoud supports us one day a week and then picks up a number of tickets for us. Once every fortnight we have a meeting and discuss the things that come up in the short and long term. That includes colleagues from our shared platform."
"We do well when our customers notice little of our work"
What do our customers notice about your work?
"Hopefully as little as possible, which means we are doing our job well. Only during announced works will they notice something of this. Besides, something can always fall over, then it's up to us to restore everything as quickly as possible."
If something goes wrong in our customers' IT environment, will they call you?
"The employees of our customers don't, they always contact our service desk in case of problems. It may happen that a service desk colleague asks me to jump in for a moment. For the bigger issues and to coordinate when planned maintenance can take place, I do have customer contact. That is often with the technical contact person within the organisation."
What exactly do you mean by scheduled maintenance?
"Not everything needs to be fixed immediately. Updates can often be planned at quiet times and carried out in the evening or on a weekend, for example."
"We don't just install an update like that"
Let's zoom in on such an update, how do you go about it?
"Our patch management system maps all available updates for workstations and servers so that we can review them. Because we don't install updates like this just like that. For example, if a customer is still working with Windows 10 and an update is not suitable for it, things can crash just like that. With updates for servers, we always check first whether there are any known problems. And if not, we first approve the updates for a few servers. Only when that all goes smoothly do we provide the rest with updates."
So how many updates are there on average per month?
"That varies quite a bit. It just depends on which problems are discovered. Once a month, Microsoft has its Patch Tuesday. Then they group a whole bunch of updates into a big cumulative update. There could easily be 50 updates in there. It also happens sometimes that an update is suddenly released to close a critical vulnerability. Then we can get to work and make sure it gets to the customer environments as quickly as possible."
"By being on top of the news, my colleagues and I are often aware of potential IT problems early on."
How do you check outside dangers, what are indispensable tools for you?
"The RMM tool I already mentioned, but also our firewalls and antivirus products. This is where notifications come from that in some cases are responded to automatically and in other cases we launch our own investigations with corresponding actions."
The moment a news item pops up in the media about IT problems in the Netherlands or worldwide, to what extent are you already informed?
"Before the media put their articles online, my colleagues and I are often already aware of vulnerabilities. This is because, as a department, we keep a sharp eye on reports from our suppliers. Or because we run into something ourselves and start investigating it, with or without a supplier. Of course, we also closely follow tech and security sites and the government platform Digital Trust Community."
And in such a situation, what is the first thing you will do?
"I share the news in Teams and take stock of it with my colleagues. Is it a serious thing that affects or could affect our customers? Then we make a plan of action. The first step is then to inform our customer(s)."
Have you avoided major damage before?
"That's a bit hard to say, but I can think of an example of a customer where a fire broke out and we made sure a disaster recovery site was quickly ready so their people could continue working. Or that a customer lost important data that we restored from backups."
Is AI helping you in your daily work?
"Indirectly definitely! Our monitoring systems use AI and that will only increase. Outside of these tools, I especially notice that AI has gone fast this year, but it is still in its infancy. Copilot, for example, is being integrated into more and more products. I myself only occasionally use ChatGPT as a tool for issues."