The 16th annual SysAdmin Appreciation Day is on Friday July 31st. To join in with the celebrations, disaster recovery provider Databarracks has launched a new “day in the life of a systems administrator (SysAdmin)” online adventure game.
Choose Your Own Adventure: Human Firewall sees players assume the role of a SysAdmin on a busy day in the office. You are faced with the everyday trials and tribulations of lazy managers and irresponsible employees, mitigating security risks whilst still keeping the lights on – all the time trying to get round to that all-important firewall update before the end of the day.
Technical Director at Databarracks, Oliver Mather, explains the motivation behind the game: “Human Firewall is obviously a bit of fun – but it’s also a nice way to drill home the importance of IT security. All too often the IT department is seen as a nuisance, deliberately putting unnecessary processes in place to stop you doing your job as quickly as you would like – and that’s not the case at all.
“Our job is to keep your data safe and keep the company operational. Without our “annoying” processes, one click of an infected email has the potential to wipe out the business. SysAdmins aren’t just there to unjam your printer or configure your new computer – although they do all that too – they’re the people that are up until 2am when the Exchange server goes down so that you’ll be able to access your emails by the next morning.”
An increase in targeted cyber-attacks is playing a big role in the developing role of the humble SysAdmin, continues Mather: “From our customer-base alone, we’re seeing an increase in cyber-attacks within the UK. The techniques used by hackers are becoming ever more sophisticated and it’s taking a whole new skillset to combat them.
“Phishing emails, for example, have become so advanced that many users will struggle to see the differences. So now it’s not just the IT team’s job to make sure your anti-virus and anti-spam is up to date, but they also have to make sure they have properly educated the rest of the businesses on the red flags to look out for, and how to avoid them – as well as ensuring the organisation has adequate backup and disaster recovery processes in place should an attack happen.
“Social engineering techniques also feature in the game because people are always the weakest link in IT security, and organisations’ awareness of the subject is perhaps not where it should be yet. Knowing what information is and isn’t OK to part with is not easy, especially when dealing with seemingly legitimate and innocent requests. Protecting an organisation and keeping the entire workforce up to speed with IT security is difficult, which is why we wanted to say a little “thank you” with Human Firewall on SysAdmin Appreciation Day.”
About Databarracks
Databarracks provides ultra-secure, award winning Disaster Recovery, Backup and Infrastructure services from UK-based, ex-military data centres.
Databarracks is certified by the Cloud Industry Forum, ISO 27001 certified for Information Security and has been named as a “Niche Player” in Gartner’s 2015 Magic Quadrant for DRaaS.
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