In our increasingly digitalized world, a profession in IT is particularly in demand. The abbreviation “IT” refers to the term “information technology”. It refers to the technology (hardware and software infrastructure) used for electronic data processing.
IT professions are also very important for nexnet. For over 20 years, nexnet has been a reliable and successful solution provider for everything from accounts receivable management to subscription billing. This means that we process very large volumes of data every day. Many of our well-known customers, such as congstar, freenet and Prosiebensat1, entrust us with their complex processes and highly sensitive data. This goes hand in hand with a great responsibility whose data protection and data security requirements are put to the test day after day.
For this reason, our IT department has a very important status. And we are always pleased when we can train new employees in the popular IT professions. To find out more about this interesting career field, we asked IT:
Interview with Sebastian Nicol
(former IT trainee, today responsible for Network, Data Security, SAP among others)
When were you a trainee at nexnet?
“I was the first IT service trainee (2003-2006) in a series of many others who successfully completed their training and were subsequently able to take up a permanent position with nexnet.”
What did you particularly like about the training?
“Even during my apprenticeship, I noticed that it is not so much in vocational school as in daily business that you learn what makes your job so valuable later on in your professional life. At the same time, working in our team provides such an incredibly broad platform of possible areas of expertise that hardly any other employer can offer.”
Can you explain the responsibilities of IT in more detail?
“From looking after workstations, data center operations, database administration, server virtualization, data center and office locations networked throughout Germany, application maintenance, monitoring, to assessing and defending/maintaining our information security. For this purpose, we have formed so-called expert clusters, which everyone in the team can supervise as desired. This provides a steady opportunity to learn new areas and expand horizons according to personal preferences.”
How many servers does nexnet’s IT support?
“We currently support over 400 servers spread across two data centers with data volumes in the petabyte range.”
What technologies do the teams at nexnet work with?
“We work with a variety of different systems in the Windows, Linux and Solaris environments, have been doing infrastructure virtualization for many years, and always strive to explore and establish new technologies if they have the potential to make our work easier or more efficient. To this end, we have an appropriately large budget available each year.”
How does nexnet ensure cyber security?
The requirements for the security of our workplaces, systems and data are becoming more and more demanding. Cybersecurity has never been as important as it is today, and it will continue to become more important in the future. The associated dangers and risks have to be kept an eye on almost daily, and mechanisms have to be designed to detect and ideally avert them. We also have a large fleet of security appliances at our disposal (next generation firewalls, vulnerability management, monitoring with over 12,000 sensors, central endpoint security management for over 300 workstations, email security solution with up to 45,000 mails processed daily, AI-powered malware sandbox, load balancer, and much more) and we regularly train all nexnet employees. At nexnet, we place great emphasis on data security and cybersecurity. Therefore, regular sensitization of employees to these issues is of high importance.
System administrator* at nexnet
Another important job in IT is that of system administrator. Many people only recognize the work of system administrators when, for example, a problem occurs with their computer. Every day, system administrators ensure that such problems do not occur in the first place and that everyone can do their work in the office undisturbed.
We asked Dirk Borkowski (Head of IT Services) about the job of a system administrator:
What does a system administrator do?
The field of work of system administrators is very extensive. Her areas of expertise include servers, storage, virtualization, operating systems, user & access management, managing licenses, applications and databases, networks, SAP system landscapes, data center, IT security, data backup and, of course, office IT management. This applies in each case to the areas of design, implementation, operation and security, and these were now only the high-level terms of their fields of activity. In other words, without system administrators, the digital processes in a company would not work.
A career in IT sounds exciting?
Our IT trains and is looking forward to young talents!
