Matthew Must - ICT Infrastructure Technician

A job as an ICT Infrastructure Technician is an incredible varied role, with each day being different from another. One minute you can be investigating an issue where an application won’t launch and the next you can be on your hands and knees lifting the office floor up to feed network cables to a new workstation.

Here, Matthew Must takes us through his day as he acts as the Duty Officer…

8am

As the Duty Officer, I log on and the first thing I do is carry out the Duty Officer checks. This includes checking all our monitoring systems to make sure that our physical and virtual servers are all up and running and don’t have any issues which could affect the applications and services that everybody within the Group uses. I also check the networking to make sure all offices and care sites are operational.

As more people work from home now, there’s a greater need for conference equipment in our offices and meeting rooms. These units are checked every morning to make sure that they’re online, logged in, up-to-date and ready for anyone to book for meetings.

I also check Rubrik, which is our backup solution. This is used to back up our systems in case an issue arises and a server runs into a problem and needs to be restored, or if something like a document has been accidentally deleted.

As Duty Officer, I need to be available for any queries or issues that have been escalated from the Service Desk or Second Line Team.

10.30am

We have a daily Infrastructure catch-up and we discuss any new or outstanding issues, plus any other updates.

11am

It’s now time for a cup of coffee … and maybe a chocolate cookie or anything else I can find in the cupboard!

All the checks have been done and the systems are up and running without issues. Now I have a look through the Service Desk and Second Line queue to see if there are any cases I can help with. They get a wide variety of issues reported to them, so if I find something that I can help with, I’ll try my best to help get it resolved.

1.30pm

It’s time for lunch. I’m in the office, so I walk over to Tesco to get some food. If I’m working from home, I’ll take Sully and Tucker, our golden retrievers, out for a walk down the riverbank. It’s always nice to get away from the computer monitors for a bit whether at home or in the office.

2.30pm

I’m in the Boston office today and it’s been reported that one of the Poly Speakers isn’t working. It was fine this morning when I did the checks so it’s time to do some investigating. There can be several reasons this has failed so I’ve got a feeling it’s not going to be a straightforward fix!

4.15pm

It’s the end of the day – as long as there are no more major outstanding issues. It’s time for the computer to be switched off for the day. Although I’m not doing it today, sometimes I need to do out-of-hours work like applying updates to our servers or updating applications, in which case the computer would stay on as these jobs can’t be done during the day as it would interfere with colleagues’ work.