The goal of this site is to provide a framework of advice for fundamental IT infrastructure management. The advice is intended to be wholly vendor- and platform-neutral, and to work from basic goals all systems administrators share, to offer a single set of principles of fundamentals forming a set of auditable best practices that ultimately help systems administrators to ensure their infrastructure

Stage 1 - The ultimate goal

The ultimate goal of a systems administrator should be to be the manager of an infrastructure that is in the best state possible for both himself and his company. That may sound trite, but clearly not all IT infrastructures exist in a perfect state for either sysadmin or company. System administration can be at times a very stressful occupation (as stressful as air traffic controllers according to one vendor report) and much of the causes of stress can be headed off by effective infrastructure management. Likewise, it is a rare company that has no complaint or frustration whatsoever with its IT department.

Stage 2 - Broad aims

The aim of infrastructure management should be to create a stable, secure ICT infrastructure that is in a known state at all times. Any deliberate alterations to the state are documented, justified, costed, approved and change-controlled, and previous states can be reverted to as needed. Any unintended alterations to the known state should have their eventualities planned for, should be identified in an automated manner as soon as they occur due to either failed change or system or hardware failure, and a selectable prior state recovered to. The entire infrastructure should be capable of being reported upon to management as needed with minimal effort, and be documented and easily understandable to others.

Stage 3 - Principles to achieve these aims

On the next page, Principles, I aim to draw up a set of general principles for instructure management that help systems administrators achieve the above aims, and in Tools I offer auditable methods of assessing adherence of any given infrastructure to these principles.