I moved into IT about a year and a half ago after working in back-office operations for several broker-dealers. IT has been a passion of mine for years, and I quickly progressed from desktop support and helpdesk work into networking and ERP administration under the guidance of a senior administrator with more than 30 years of experience.
That senior employee recently left after being pushed out by leadership, and I'm now the only IT person supporting the company. I'm responsible for helpdesk, systems administration, networking, ERP, budgeting, virtualization, identity, and essentially anything else that runs on electricity. I'm still being paid entry-level helpdesk wages and only have a CompTIA A+ certification.
Our environment includes hybrid Active Directory, Azure, on-premises infrastructure, remote employees, and older VMware hosts without centralized management because vCenter was removed. We also have a critical business report running on an old virtual machine that requires a legacy desktop client. Remote users do not receive on-premises Group Policy updates, and we currently have no mobile device management solution.
My biggest concern is that our shipping servers have no automated backup system. The business ships products every day, and we have already experienced a UPS failure that caused serious problems. Some of the virtualization infrastructure is aging, and the shipping software now lists Windows 11 as a requirement while parts of the environment cannot support it.
I need practical guidance on prioritizing risks, designing a backup and recovery process, learning Azure and endpoint management, and documenting what needs attention. I'm willing to learn, but I'm overwhelmed and increasingly burned out. What should I focus on first, and what training or resources would help me build a sensible plan?
4 Answers
For the backup project, make an inventory first: every physical host, virtual machine, application, database, file share, and dependency. Record how much data exists, how quickly it changes, the acceptable recovery time, and how much data loss the business could tolerate.
Then use the 3-2-1 approach: at least three copies of the data, on two different types of storage, with one copy offline or otherwise protected from ransomware. Keep at least one backup outside the production virtualization environment, restrict access to it, monitor backup jobs, and schedule regular test restores. Document who owns the recovery decision and the exact order in which systems must be brought back.
A community edition backup product may be suitable for a small environment, but validate licensing, storage capacity, application consistency, and support limitations before relying on it. The important part is the recovery design, not the brand name.
You should also address the employment situation. You are performing the work of an entire IT department while being paid entry-level support wages, and the company appears to have limited staffing and little budget. Ask leadership directly whether they intend to fund additional help, outside support, training, and appropriate compensation.
Present a short risk-and-investment document: what could fail, the operational impact, the approximate cost to reduce each risk, and which items need outside expertise. If leadership will not provide resources but still expects you to own everything, keep your work within the scope of your compensation and continue building your resume. This experience can be valuable, but it should not require you to burn out or become the scapegoat for decisions you cannot control.
I’ve been keeping my resume updated. The hardest part is that leadership treats not knowing every specialty as a personal failure, even though I’m expected to handle desktop support, cloud administration, ERP, networking, and infrastructure simultaneously.
Check your existing Microsoft licensing before planning a cloud-management rollout. Business Standard generally does not include the full endpoint-management capabilities you would want, while some E3 or Premium licenses may. Intune and Microsoft Learn are good places to study device enrollment, configuration policies, application deployment, compliance, and the transition from on-premises Group Policy.
Do not attempt a major hybrid-to-cloud migration alone while the environment is unstable. Build a small test group, document the current policies, and migrate gradually. Microsoft Learn has structured material for Azure, Entra ID, and Intune, and the CIS Controls are useful for creating a prioritized security checklist.
Start with business risk rather than trying to learn every part of Azure at once. Identify which systems are critical, what data they contain, how they are currently protected, and how long the business can survive without them. Put the gaps in writing for management.
Backups and restore testing should be near the top of the list, especially for systems involved in shipping. A backup is not really a backup until you have successfully restored from it. After that, prioritize identity and access, patching, endpoint management, monitoring, documentation, and then the virtualization and hybrid-directory cleanup.
Also, do not quietly accept personal responsibility for years of technical debt. You inherited an environment that previously depended on someone with decades of experience. That is a staffing and management problem, not proof that you are failing.
That makes sense. I know backups are the biggest concern, but I’m not sure how to design the process. I’ve been looking at Veeam Community Edition because we only have a small number of important virtual machines. I’d like to understand the concepts and recovery planning before I start installing anything.
I would also make sure management understands the cost of the storage, implementation time, and recovery testing. A backup project needs an approved budget and an owner, not just a product download.