IT administrator is among the most critical roles in any organization. By managing and maintaining key IT systems and infrastructure, they help to keep employees happy and productive while mitigating business risk. That’s particularly important in a startup laser-focused on growth.

While no two businesses — or IT administrators — are the same, AccessOwl has spoken at length with several practitioners to better understand the challenges keeping them awake at night. Their responses ranged from managing SaaS apps and users to budget constraints and ineffective bosses.

Here are some of the topics we discussed:

Finding the right IT tools

Like many IT admins, Peter Fallowfield, former IT Support Manager at Solidatus, was the only “tech guy” in his company when he started. His first challenge was trying to settle on the right mix of automated and manual tasks — an undertaking made more difficult by the lack of IT tools suitable for his small to medium-sized company.

“There seems to be a gap where you get software aimed at quite small companies, and then software aimed at massive enterprises — and startups sit in between the two,” he explains. “You might be going for a security certification, which the smaller software doesn’t really account for. But you don't really want these big complex IT systems when you've only got one person doing IT, because there's too much to manage.”

Taking ownership

Once an IT admin has the right tools and processes in place, they need to decide how much freedom and control over SaaS apps to hand over to their business units. Felix Naepels, former Head of Internal IT at Pigment, says that — in this regard — SaaS apps are his biggest challenge.

“One of the biggest challenges is rethinking ownership of SaaS apps as a core part of the things you need to handle as an admin of a company. You can't rely only on IT — or even the purchaser — to be the owner of all those apps, because we’re not procurement people,” he says.

“It’s about letting go of the ownership of those apps — while still maintaining a level of control that allows you to be certain that they're not being run in a way you don't want.”

It’s also important for an IT admin not to push their own agenda and force employees to buy and use apps they’re not familiar or comfortable with, adds former Airtower Networks IT Manager, Derek McGee.

“As IT professionals, we know the best way to do this. But your employees are comfortable using what they have, and they don’t want to disrupt their business continuity,” McGee explains. “So you first have to adjust to what they already have, and make that work better for them. Then — once the limitations become apparent — that's when you take the opportunity to discuss a roadmap.”

User lifecycle management

It’s absolutely critical to any business to ensure that its staff are on- and off-boarded seamlessly. But a lack of effective identity management tools — as well as SSO integration and transparency issues — can present roadblocks, says Jakub Łączak-Król, IT Asset Manager at XTB. For him, offboarding is always a higher priority than onboarding. That’s because, if a new employee hasn’t been granted access, their permissions can be added later with minimal fuss — whereas if a departing user’s access is not revoked swiftly, it can create major security and compliance risks.

“I created internal audits for myself. So I set regular reminders for me to go through checklists for each platform. I’d manually track whether any employees who’ve left the company still have access to any of these platforms,” Łączak-Król explains.

The aim should always be to keep access management processes as simple and straightforward as possible.

“You should designate groups and conditional access in a way that makes it easy to tell what each group is doing and why they need the access they’ve been given,” he says.

Too many apps and permissions

It can be difficult to control an IT environment when the number of apps, roles, and permissions throughout the business snowballs, says Airtower Networks’ McGee.

“My pain point right now is that we have so many different solutions — and not enough standardization — when it comes to roles and responsibilities,” he says. “So in one platform, our business development executives have all these responsibilities and permissions to do certain things. But a lot of the time, their roles will vary a bit from the other BDEs when it comes to the database side. So being flexible — with the ability to customize permissions for different individuals — can be quite hard and time consuming.”

Limited budget

It’s even harder to attempt such ambitious initiatives without sufficient financial resources, says Syed Faizan Ul Haq, Senior IT Administrator at Journee.

“In the interviews, everyone says ‘okay we have a budget, it's not a problem.’ But when you join and ask for the budget three months later, everything is denied. I face this problem everywhere,” he says. “If you don't have a CISO, and you want IT administration to also perform some security tasks, then you also need to bring the budget. But startups aren’t very keen on security, unless they face a breach.”

Budgets can also quickly dry up when vendors arbitrarily raise their prices, adds Solidatus’ Fallowfield.

“Every year the pricing plans seem to change for SaaS products, and it’s constraining for the IT manager,” he says.

Poor management

Sometimes, people are the biggest challenge for IT administrators — especially their immediate superiors, says Alex Gogun, IT Specialist at Cymulate. He explains how, in a previous role’s interview stage, he was on a path to become IT manager after a few months. But instead, a new VP of product was appointed directly above him, with no experience in IT.

“That was a major bottleneck. I had a lot of ideas, a lot of potential projects. But when he came, it just didn't give me the oxygen that I needed to get started,” he explains. “It was just a big mess.”

Cultural differences

Sometimes the challenges arise not from those above you, but from colleagues and other IT users with particular cultural sensitivities, says a former IT Manager at Drivemode.

“One of the challenges I have is to identify the right framework to apply within the environment I'm in, so that I can align the services to better support the team. Specifically, I often need to regionalize services within a Japanese culture or a Korean culture,” he explains. “It’s about ensuring that everyone feels comfortable coming to IT for their requests, knowing that they can trust us, and won’t keep things from us.”

Human roadblocks

At other times, the way employees work and how they treat IT can make the role of admin that much harder, argues an IT Specialist who works in fintech.

“I had some issues where people would come to me for help, but then they were so busy that we couldn't really move forward and work on these issues together to solve them,” he says.

It’s a valuable reminder that, even when it’s possible to get the right IT tools and processes in place, sometimes the toughest challenges to resolve involve dealing with different people.