SolarWinds established IT Professionals Day in September 2015. The holiday falls on the third Tuesday of each September. It honors IT professionals, acknowledges their challenges, and emphasizes their essential role in keeping today’s businesses operational.
Shruti Umathe
Sr. Associate - Content Operations, Spiceworks Ziff Davis
September 17, 2024
IT teams may find themselves in an odd position: when everything is working properly, nobody knows they exist. But when technology doesn’t cooperate, it can seem as if the entire organization is lining up at their door looking for a solution. IT Professionals DayOpens a new window gives everyone an opportunity to acknowledge and thank those who work behind the scenes to ensure networks, applications, and even businesses stay up and running.
In celebration of IT Professionals Day, Spiceworks compiled a group of IT and business professionals to examine how the role of the IT pro has changed, review the necessary skills for modern IT pros, and share tips for business leaders on how to make the most of IT during this age of digital transformation.
Derrin Rummelt, Senior Product Manager, Rubrik
“IT professionals are behind the curtain, ensuring that the show goes on. They ensure that networks are secure, up-to-date, and efficient, and play a vital role in everything from migrating your IT infrastructure to a new environment to implementing a comprehensive IT resilience strategy. It is becoming more apparent that IT is essential for all industries in the modern world. Therefore, National IT Professionals Day is a great opportunity to take a moment to thank technology professionals for their hard work, dedication, and commitment to keeping the technology and IT infrastructure powering businesses running smoothly.”
Stephen Gailey, Field CTO, Securonix
“The IT Pros tasked with ensuring security in a modern enterprise are faced with huge challenges every day. Each time a device or user interacts with a corporate network, the activity is logged. Thousands of logs are created every day and some are much more dangerous than others. To the untrained eye, each individual log may seem insignificant. As Sherlock Holmes once said, there is a clear distinction between seeing and observing. It’s only when all of this activity is linked together that the real picture begins to emerge.
It takes a truly skilled eye and the latest technology to detect a real threat as it forms amidst the clouds of uncertainty. In today’s business environment, IT Pros have their work cut out. They know there are hundreds of adversaries out there, but with so many distractions, spotting the real threats takes skill. This is why IT Pros deserve to be fully appreciated on days like today – and every other day of the year.”
Gijsbert Janssen van Doorn, Global AI Platform Technical Sales and Strategy, NVIDIA
“Regardless of the level of risk, organisations need to be protected and available 24/7/365. This can put enormous pressure on IT professionals, whose responsibility it is to ensure the business maintains IT resilience in the wake of any disruption. This can be a huge task, as highlighted in a recent survey in which 91% of IT professionals said their business experienced a tech-related disruption over the last two years.
The best thing a company can do this IT Professionals’ Day to support the IT Pros that keep things running, is to invest in tools that can help them enable resilience – combatting downtime once and for all. Essentially, this means tools that are easy and simple to use, multi-purpose, work across all types of infrastructure, and are ready to adapt to the ever evolving innovation needs of an organisation. It’s tools like this that are critical when it comes to IT Pros being able to focus on ensuring the IT is running smoothly, rather than spending their precious time recovering from downtime that could have been prevented.”
Bob Davis, Vice President of Marketing, Splashtop Inc.
“There’s no getting around the fact that software is now fundamental to success in business today. It’s so ingrained in operational functions that every organization is now a software organization and has to be run as such. This puts great value on the IT pros that ensure their companies keep pace with the constantly changing world of IT.
We also know that IT professionals provide more than smooth operations and well-oiled software–they impact the bottom line. When done right, IT pros choose, build and manage the software that can allow organizations to intuitively address the needs of customers. Business in today’s climate moves at light speed, and customers demand instant gratification that must be satisfied in days and hours, not months. This means your organization’s technology must be able to react to the customer’s needs and provide solutions at a pace that makes your customer more successful. This focus requires strong IT teams and the expertise they provide to stay ahead. This role within organizations will become more and more essential in the years ahead, and with the value that skilled IT professionals provide, organizations will be able to embrace change, identify value and create processes that deliver success.”
Neil Barton, CTO, Clean Data
“IT professionals are on the front line every day ensuring the company’s data infrastructure is armed and ready to deliver critical and prompt business insights. On top of this, the role of the IT professional itself is continually evolving and expanding given emerging technologies and changing organizational needs.
Data infrastructure automation arms IT with not only the tools needed to design, develop, deploy and operate data warehousing projects with the fastest time to value possible, but also provides the ability to offload the repetitive and mundane hand-coding required with traditional development approaches. Giving IT back additional time, through automation, provides IT professionals more opportunity to both stay current with evolving technologies and be more strategic in serving the business.”
Craig Hinkley, CEO, CloudBolt Software
“With these global staffing shortages, some departments may only have 10 staffers when the number to adequately do their jobs should really be teams of 15 or 20, directly leading to increased stress levels.
These skill shortages represent a widespread threat to the security of all of us. Not having enough trained workers for the organizations that we trust to protect our data leaves us all vulnerable in one way or another. Furthermore, the organizations that are adequately equipped with enough cybersecurity professionals tend to still be overworked, highly stressed, and prone to burnout.
On IT Professionals Day, please join me in helping bring attention to this serious matter. Whether you are a CEO of a leading organization, or simply a friend or family member of someone who works in the industry, spread the word about this problem. The safety of our digital lives is at stake, and we need to all do our part in raising awareness of these issues. If you or someone you know needs help, contact ADAA, a nonprofit national organization committed to the prevention, treatment, and cure of anxiety and mood disorders.”
Craig Fulton, Advisor, Brand, M&A, and Community, Evergreen Services Group
“Not a day goes by that businesses and customers don’t benefit from the hard work of IT professionals. From system administrators to network engineers, IT support technicians and many more, each and every one of them plays a vital role in leading the charge for technology innovation and business success.
In addition to acting as the backbone of an organization, IT professionals spend their time troubleshooting, and protecting businesses from security breaches and productivity-killing downtime. That’s why initiatives like IT Pro Day give us a chance to hail them as the true heroes of technology, helping organizations achieve their full potential.”
Editor’s Note: These expert quotes about IT Professionals Day were originally collected and published in September 2019. Job titles and photos have been updated to reflect current positions.
Shruti is an engineer by qualification, so she tends to explore the topics in the dynamic space of security, cloud, and networking. She is a dog-lover, and on weekends, you will usually find her whipping up a pencil sketch. She is also a fan of Marvel Cinematic Universe, Friends and Harry Potter!
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