Backup IT administrators – meaning personnel whose jobs center on managing data backup and recovery operations – are like the linemen who keep power grids running or the farmers whose sweat and toil ensure that dinner reaches your table: They play roles that are absolutely essential, but that are also often unseen and underappreciated.
Indeed, IT admin work in general tends to be less prestigious – and less well-paid – than roles in trendier tech disciplines like software engineering, DevOps, and Site Reliability Engineering. And within IT administration, backup admins are often one of the lowest rungs on the ladder. They might be a step above help desk staff, who earn $25 per hour on average, but with wages that average $40 per hour, backup admins don’t enjoy the same level of prestige and pay as IT admins responsible for tasks like provisioning or optimizing infrastructure.
Yet, without backup admins, the typical organization would find itself facing undue risk at best, and experiencing a crippling failure at worst. That’s because backup admins play an absolutely essential role in modern businesses, despite the position they tend to occupy within the IT hierarchy.
This begs the questions: Why do businesses tend to treat backup admins so poorly (relative to other tech-centric roles, at least)? Should organizations improve the status of staff who manage backups and disaster recovery? If so, how?
Let’s explore the answers by discussing the state of backup IT administrators in most businesses today and what organizations can do to improve their lot.
The critical – but under-appreciated – role of data backup admins
On the surface, the importance of backup admins in modern businesses might seem self-explanatory. Most organizations recognize at least to some degree that protecting their data is important for ensuring business continuity, so you might think they would prioritize staff who specialize in data protection.
The reality, though, is that backup admins rarely enjoy much prestige or pay. As we noted above, backup admins earn about $40 per hour, on average. In contrast, average hourly pay for software developers is north of $70, while DevOps engineers make about $60 per hour. By the standards of the IT industry as a whole, backup admins don’t make out all too well on payday.
And it’s not just comparatively low pay that sets backup admins apart. They also tend to occupy relatively low positions within organizational hierarchies and decision-making trees. If a business plans to roll out a new application or adopt a more complex cloud architecture, you can bet that the folks overseeing tasks like software development, infrastructure management, and cybersecurity will be consulted. But backup admins may only find out about the change when they receive a memo telling them they need to update backup operations to protect a new application or cloud environment.
What happens when businesses marginalize backup IT admins
The lack of investment in backup admins is bad not just for people who choose career paths focused on data protection. It’s also a serious problem for businesses, which may face several types of severe risks when they don’t have capable data backup IT admins on hand.
Increased risk of data loss
The most obvious risk, perhaps, is data loss. When there is no one on staff who spends virtually all of their working day planning and executing data backup and disaster recovery plans, the chance that a business will be able to recover its data successfully following a disaster is much lower.
We’ll emphasize here that simply having data backups doesn’t guarantee protection against data loss. A variety of issues can arise that prevent successful recovery even if you have backups on hand – like ransomware attackers who destroy backups because no one thought to make the data immutable or backup data that is too outdated to meet business continuity requirements.
The job of backup admins is to manage risks like these and maximize the chances that backups will actually protect against data loss. Without anyone doing this critical work, the risk of permanent data loss following an incident is much higher.
Inefficient disaster recovery processes
Data backup admins also play a critical role in ensuring that businesses can carry out disaster recovery quickly and efficiently. This is important because even if you have the technical means to recover following a disaster, failure to recover quickly enough to meet RTO and RPO requirements may still place your business at serious risk.
Here again, we’ll emphasize that on their own, data backups are no guarantee of a speedy recovery. Issues like corrupt backup data or slow data transfer speeds during recovery operations could lead to substantial delays or complications. The job of backup admins is to get ahead of these issues and ensure that disaster recovery is as smooth as possible.
Compliance and legal implications
While there is no compliance regulation that specifically requires organizations to employ backup IT admins, plenty of regulations – such as GDPR and NIS 2 – include rules related to undertaking reasonable measures to ensure that sensitive data is protected. It’s easier to meet these requirements when you have backup specialists on your IT team, and when you give them the power within your organization that they need to be successful.
Why don’t IT departments treat backup admins better?
No formal studies exist to explain the gap between the critical work backup admins perform and the lowly positions they occupy within most organizational hierarchies. But we’d hazard a guess that it has a lot to do with backup and disaster recovery work tending to be seen as basic and straightforward, and therefore not deserving of high compensation levels or great prestige. The executives and managers higher up in the IT food chain – most of whom have never actually been directly responsible for backups – may believe that data protection is an easy job because it merely boils down to creating copies of data and calling it a day.
In reality, of course, data protection entails much more. It requires carefully assessing RTO and RPO goals, and then crafting a backup schedule that aligns with them. It also entails extensive disaster recovery testing and drills to confirm that backups actually enable successful recovery. And it requires specialized expertise, like the ability to implement cross-cloud backup strategies.
This is why IT admins who specialize in data backup and disaster recovery are a smart investment – even if the typical business doesn’t always recognize it as such.
Will automation replace IT backup admins?
The lack of glory surrounding backup admins may also partly reflect the notion that there is little need to hire humans to manage backup because sophisticated backup software can do their jobs for them. IT leaders may wonder why, in the age of ubiquitous IT automation and AI, they need to allocate budget for backup staff.
The reality is that, although data protection software has indeed come a long, long way from the days when backup tools simply made copies of file systems or databases, backup and disaster recovery work remain far too complex – and important – to outsource to software tools alone.
We would know: N2WS is a sophisticated data protection platform packed with automation features like seamless cross-cloud recovery and one-click restores. But as much as we’d like to tell you that our software can magically automate all of your data backup and disaster recovery needs for you without requiring human oversight, the reality is that it can’t.
No data protection platform can because, again, data protection is a complex endeavor that requires deep expertise. Advanced data protection solutions like N2WS provide the capabilities necessary to back up and recover data at scale while minimizing costs and maximizing reliability, but to use those capabilities effectively, businesses need a skilled backup admin (or two, or three) who understands their organizations’ data protection needs and can deploy software in a way that aligns with them.
How to empower backup IT admins
Now that we’ve detailed why backup IT admins often occupy a marginal role within organizational hierarchies – if they exist at all – and why this is bad for businesses, let’s explore solutions for empowering backup admins to do their jobs more effectively.
Include backup admins in decision-making
One obvious step is making backup admins central participants in IT decision-making processes. Virtually any change to applications or infrastructure has implications for data backup and recovery operations because procedures may need to change to accommodate the new resource.
For that reason, backup admins should be able to offer their perspective before important decisions are made regarding new technology investments or changes. If businesses fail to loop backup admins into the conversation from the start, they risk discovering when it’s too late that a new or updated resource can’t be backed up and recovered successfully.
Offer training for backup admins
Backup and disaster recovery technologies are constantly evolving. To be as successful as possible, backup admins must remain up-to-date.
To that end, businesses should consider paying for training or certifications for their backup admins. This is a common practice for other roles within modern IT organizations, like software development, and backup admins should receive the same opportunities to upskill.
Set clear backup priorities
Some data and workloads are more important than others. Backup admins are set up for success when they know what matters most to their organization.
IT leaders can help in this regard by establishing clear priorities for what to back up and what to recover first. They shouldn’t leave it to backup admins to make their own guesses about what to prioritize, since it’s often not possible for admins within large organizations to identify all priorities across multiple departments and lines of business.
Implement advanced backup technologies
As we said, advanced backup solutions are no substitute for skilled backup admins. But they’re nonetheless a critical resource within the backup admin’s tool set. To ensure that admins can work as effectively as possible, organizations should empower them with sophisticated backup software that is capable not just of creating backups, but also of automating disaster recovery, supporting cross-cloud recovery, and backing up important configuration settings in addition to data and apps.
Without capabilities like these at their disposal, even the most skilled backup admins will struggle to protect data reliably and efficiently.
Empowering backup admins with N2WS
When it comes to giving backup admins the features they need to excel, N2W has your business covered. From automated remediation of failed backup operations, to one-click disaster recovery, to network configuration cloning and beyond, N2WS provides a broad range of advanced data protection capabilities that empower backup admins to be the best they can be. Learn more by requesting a free trial
Chris Tozzi
Chris, who has worked as a journalist and Linux systems administrator, is a freelance writer specializing in areas such as DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud computing, and AI and machine learning. He is also an adviser for Fixate IO, an adjunct research adviser for IDC, and a professor of IT and society at a polytechnic university in upstate New York.
