Professional network administration is crucial for securing your technology.  Most importantly, it is crucial for protecting your business assets and intellectual property.  However, many IT technicians and engineers don’t work to established standards.  They rely on best-guesses, trial and error, or off-the-shelf reseller solutions to support their clients.

Therefore, to help you get a basic understanding of security administration, we look at Microsoft’s 10 Immutable Laws. This article provides our insight on the 7th Law.

“The most secure network is a well-administered one.”

Microsoft’s 10 Immutable Laws of Security Administration: Law #7

When we are called in to investigate networks with security issues, we often find this is due to a lack of maintenance.  Maintenance includes keeping a business network operating to a known set of standards.  As a result, professional network administration is a perpetual process.

For that reason, it is not surprising that lack of maintenance and security issues go hand in hand.  Both are caused by lack of standards.

Maintenance is a corner stone of a healthy reliable network. 

Without maintenance, you cannot eliminate downtime or security breaches. However, lack of maintenance is rarely highlighted as the cause of an outage or breach.  Instead other causes are blamed. Yes, it is possible that other causes may be involved.  However, low standards makes it much easier for data breaches and other unfortunate events to take place.

Certainly people working in IT have a tendency to be attracted to bright shiny objects.  Many of them ignore more mundane things, such as maintenance. They don’t realise that maintenance, like security, is more than a tool, or software. 

Professional network administration takes discipline and dedication to standards.  Providing regular maintenance avoids break-fix scenarios, security breaches, and helps clients get a better ROI on their technology.

Therefore, we owe it to our clients, to do the things that matter, not just the things we find easiest or most exciting.  This is the foundation of providing professional network administration.  To learn more about how we work, contact us.