One career option that is quite a remarkable one in the IT services field is that in Infrastructure Management. The job in this domain deals with management of IT infrastructure both hardware and software.
Broadly speaking we may classify service providers in this area into two groups:
Broadly speaking we may classify service providers in this area into two groups:
- Those managing both hardware and software
- Those managing only software
The first category of service providers comprises of data centers, network service providers etc that have the hardware installed in a facility that they manage. They manage at least the basic service providing software that is installed on top of this hardware.
The second category of service providers comprises of organizations that have people managing only the software that is running on such hardware infrastructure and almost all of these people would be doing this management remotely.
Typcially the software management would deal with
- Management of server operating systems (Unix/Linux, Windows or even operating systems in virtualized model). We will talk about virtualization in a separate post.
- Management of databases (for example Oracle, MS SQL, MySQL or any other database installation)
- Management of software applications (for example mail servers, or any other applications that are made available to people over the internet). there are thousands of such applications that are used in this manner by people as individuals as well as by organizations for their business processes.
An Infrastructure Management professional may be dealing with any or all of these in their day to day work and would tell you that it is extremely challenging work. What makes it challenging?
For one, most of the time the software that is running in this model is extremely business critical for any organization (think about banks running their applications that cannot afford even a second of downtime).
Professionals may have to deal with hardware failures, software failures, upgrades, updates, migration of software and many other operations that involve lots of planning and careful execution (taking and restoring huge backups among other things).
All in all, this makes this career path among IT professional very interesting with daily chunks of problem solving and opportunity to take very serrious responsibilities in ensuring that the businesses of today run without a hitch.
A few interesting links that the readers may explore for further information are:
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