No Holiday Respite For IT Pros

Over the next several days, while many people are slurping down eggnog, exchanging gifts with loved ones, and festively greeting 2014, the ones who keep workplace technology humming along will be on edge.

Similar to police, firefighters and nurses, the IT administrators of the world are always on call. They accept that their good times can be shattered at any moment by a call to action.

A holiday survey of more than 140 IT professionals conducted by network monitoring software vendor Ipswitch found that 46 percent will be on call this holiday season. Most of that time will be spent helping users who are having problems accessing their network remotely (51%), are grappling with poor app performance (26%), or have forgotten their passwords (17%).

Nearly one in three survey participants reported experiencing a major network outage during previous holiday seasons.

“Even the holidays can’t provide a brief respite for many hardworking IT pros,” Ennio Carboni, president and general manager of Ipswitch's network management division, said in a statement. “They may be giving up downtime with friends and family to make sure your networks have uptime.”

Read the rest of this article on Network Computing.