Course Outline

A four-session course outline modeled after your original cybersecurity-focused sessions, but reoriented toward system administrators with a strong emphasis on maintaining system reliability, avoiding preventable issues, reducing operational costs, and closing security loopholes before they become risks.

Course Title:

Reliability First: Building Resilient, Secure, and Cost-Efficient Systems

Session 1: The System Admin Talent Gap & Operational Resilience

• The growing global shortage of skilled system administrators and its impact on uptime

• Why diverse skill sets (automation, networking, security, cloud) matter in modern sysadmin teams

• Retention challenges in high-pressure infrastructure roles—and how to mitigate burnout

• Leveraging open-source training and commercial stuff to standardize skills

• Building internal talent pipelines through mentoring, documentation, and cross-training

Session 2: Outage Avoidance: The First 72 Hours Before Failure

• Anatomy of preventable outages: configuration drift, missed patches, capacity blind spots

• Proactive monitoring vs. reactive firefighting: defining early-warning thresholds

• Pre-mortems: simulating failures before they happen (Chaos Engineering Lite for SMBs)

• Communication protocols: who to alert—and when—before a system degrades

• Cost of downtime vs. cost of prevention: making the case for reliability investments

• Key roles during near-misses: sysadmin, DevOps, security, and business continuity leads

Session 3: The Compliance Mirage in Infrastructure Management

• Why “passing uptime audits” ≠ real resilience (e.g., ticking boxes on backup checks but never testing restores)

• Case studies: compliant systems that failed catastrophically due to overlooked dependencies

• The hidden risk of “it’s always worked this way” thinking in legacy environments

• Moving beyond ISO 27001/ITIL checklists: asking “What breaks if this server dies right now?”

• Cultivating a culture of operational humility: blameless post-mortems, shared runbooks, and continuous improvement

Session 4: The Hidden Costs of Technical & Reliability Debt

• What is reliability debt? (Unpatched OSes, manual deployments, undocumented systems, stale DNS records)

• How reliability debt silently inflates costs: emergency fixes, slower deployments, security gaps

• Calculating TCO of “quick fixes” vs. sustainable automation (Ansible, Terraform, monitoring-as-code)

• Prioritizing modernization: which legacy systems pose the highest risk per dollar spent

• Making the business case: ROI of proactive maintenance, automation, and secure-by-default configurations

Learning Outcomes for Participants:

• Shift from reactive firefighting to proactive system stewardship

• Identify and quantify hidden costs of reliability and security debt

• Implement low-cost, high-impact practices for uptime and breach prevention

• Align infrastructure decisions with business continuity and compliance goals

• Build resilient, well-documented, and team-maintainable systems—even with limited resources

This course is ideal for system administrators, DevOps engineers, IT managers, and MSP providers (like your Remote Support LLC clientele) who want to reduce incidents, lower total cost of ownership, and close security gaps before exploitation—all while building more sustainable, scalable operations.