It’s easy to see why network admins are often compared to superheroes – they go above and beyond offering infrastructural eyes and ears, responding rapidly to threats, and providing the backbone of modern business operations.
But even heroes have limits. Today, managing digital networks is only getting harder. Systems that once operated in isolation now connect to enterprise networks, creating hybrid environments and tearing down old walls between IT and OT teams. As a result, many are increasingly burning out, quitting, and taking institutional knowledge with them.
If the current quality and quantity of threats is the new normal, especially during a tech talent crunch with more open positions than practitioners, companies need to respond in kind. They must better align cross-network oversight and integrate solutions that reduce manual overhead rather than increase it. Only then can we realistically expect admins to meet the moment without burning out.
An underresourced job that’s only getting harder
There are a few things adding to the admin degree of difficulty. First, there’s the uneasy intersection of operational technology (OT) and information technology (IT). As these domains merge, admins are forced to consider both sides simultaneously rather than just one or the other. This demands new methods of monitoring – not to mention cultural upheaval – to unlock unified observability.
Achieving this is easier said than done. We recently surveyed more than 1200 infrastructure managers and network admins, and found that complex protocols and fragmented tools are consistent ecosystem challenges. Further, about 65% of respondents use alarm- or notification-based monitoring, meaning that admins will receive warnings as they occur and hope to respond in time. This is a start but leaves most teams in a reactive rather than proactive posture, firefighting issues rather than preventing them ahead of time.
Foresight like this is invaluable in the age of artificial intelligence (AI). Hackers are in a productivity boom, automating network probes and launching higher-quality infiltration attempts. Unfortunately, with only 74 qualified workers for every 100 cybersecurity jobs in demand, admins are already stretched thin and feeling the brunt. One-third of admins list burnout as their biggest job concern. When your most seasoned professionals are this close to breaking, and the odds are only moving further out of their favor, something’s got to give.
Giving admins the tools to meet the moment
Admins are under extreme pressure – they don’t need capes but better tools, support, and automation.
Change starts at the top and it’s heartening that leaders are paying attention. In June, Fortinet found that more than half of organizations (52%) now place CISO or CSO responsibility for OT – up from just 16% in 2022 – and nearly all organizations (95%) report C-suite responsibility for OT, up from 41%. This is good news because, with executive support, teams can better overcome cultural differences and onboard solutions specific to their circumstances. Fortinet confirmed this is the right approach with OT-focused organizations experiencing fewer breaches.
This executive backing must translate into the right investments. Modern infrastructure teams benefit from unified platforms and architectures that treat factory floors as extensions of cloud-native environments. This way, with containerized monitoring and standardized observability breaking down silos, there’s less finger-pointing across the IT-OT divide. Likewise, a single pane of glass translates legacy industrial protocols and bridges the old and the new.
Always-on networks and always-active hackers also demand more intelligent systems. Alert fatigue is a big problem with notification monitoring, which is why more companies are turning to automated anomaly detection. These systems learn what’s normal and only surface real problems – a one-two punch that reduces complexity and flags issues ahead of time. Better yet, this can unlock predictive maintenance and extend the life of production machinery.
Companies, leaders, and platforms can all play a role in providing solutions that not only solve technical pain points but also make the admin day-to-day experience more manageable. There’s a triple benefit if we can pull this off: networks running reliably, businesses operating with maximum uptime, and admins enjoying more bandwidth for the bigger picture.
Admins have our backs, we must have theirs
Admins have rightly earned their superhero comparisons through tireless defense of digital infrastructure. When everything runs smoothly, they remain invisible. When something breaks, however, they’re expected to save the day. The thing is, unlike comic book heroes, they can’t be expected to do everything alone, particularly in the face of smarter attacks, evermore complex ecosystems, and changing roles.
With great power comes great responsibility – and right now this falls on leadership to recognize the gap and work to close it. This requires unified platforms that reduce tool sprawl, predictive monitoring that catches issues before they cascade, and cultures where asking for help isn’t seen as failure.
Admins have our backs and it’s time leadership had theirs. Because when we protect the people behind the networks, the networks themselves become stronger.
