Celebrating International Women’s Day with a Brite Spotlight! Meet Jess, Network Administrator

Today, we’re celebrating Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day by getting to know one of Brite’s very own #WomenInTech! We’re excited to introduce you to one of our NOC specialists, Jess.  She’s been part of the Brite team for five years and outlined her current tech role as a Network Administrator!  

First off, what is a NOC? 

NOC stands for Network Operations Center. The team is together in one room to make for easy collaboration on tasks and alerts. We monitor our customer sites with dashboards, gauges and alerting so our customers have minimal downtime. We’re constantly monitoring servers being down, IP ranges filling up, ensuring Datto backup appliances are checking in, etc.

What do you think is the biggest misconception about working in a NOC?

That we’re simply just a helpdesk. The NOC is much more than just taking calls and responding to tickets from customers. Daily, we all work together to research new ways to try to limit tickets and ensure the highest up times for customers. In addition, we work on projects including network hardware migrations, email migration to O365 and running network assessments. 

What are 5 daily tasks you do as a Network Administrator? 

• Backup checks.  This involves checking the server backups daily for each customer in the event that they need data recovery or a full backup disaster recovery. 
• Ensure reactive tickets are being updated and worked on by all the techs to get them closed as quickly and efficiently as possible.
• QBR (quarterly business review) preparation for customers. We meet with our customers quarterly to ensure open communication so that everything is up to date, and we make customers aware of any future changes or actionable upgrades. 
• Resolving tickets that have been escalated from Level 1.
• Responding to alerts that come in for servers being down.

What is your favorite part about being a Network Administrator? 

Learning the many and evolving aspects of IT.

What 3 words would you use to describe your job? 

• Fast-paced
• Dynamic
• Meticulous 

What kinds of security risks are you seeing? 

Lack of user training is a big risk as social engineering becomes more prevalent. We’re seeing more phishing emails that are extremely specific, which makes users vulnerable. The targeted emails posing as a colleague/executive or vendor appear to be legitimate, resulting in users clicking on malicious links. 

Have you ever caught any malicious software in progress? 

In doing my daily server backup checks, I was alerted of ransomware on a server. I logged into the server and worked with our NOC manager to find what it was and where it was coming from. We were able to remove it and make security changes to prevent another attack from happening in the future.  You can read more about the attack here. 

We hope you enjoyed getting to know Jess and how our NOC operates! Happy International Women’s Day!