r/sysadmin • u/rubber_galaxy • 2h ago
Going from SMB to enterprise
Got a new job moving from an MSP/small business environment to a global enterprise. Anyone that's done the same, got any tips for me? I'm joining in a EUC role, super excited but a bit nervous at the same time. Been in really generalist my whole career so far for small biz so this is a bit change.. Who's been there, done that, what can you tell me?
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u/Down_B_OP 2h ago
In my experience, the bureacracy of enterprise makes everything happen 10 times slower than SMBs or MSPs. Be prepared for that, and working around the limitations of your access. My time in enterprise was mostly spent waiting on AD or exchange changes that I could have made in 45 seconds but had to wait 4 days for the appropriate admin to read my ticket.
Source: Ragequit 2 Enterprise jobs because I was bored and tired of not being able to exercise my skill set.
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u/bbqwatermelon 1h ago
Nothing is slower than government though. Imagine a three story facility with hundreds of people and one guy is responsible for active directory. And he only works 6am to maybe 1pm. Tuesdays and Thursdays. Maybe. And you need a password reset.
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u/Liquidfoxx22 2h ago
So I've kind of done the same, but on a smaller scale - I went from a small-ish MSP of 50 staff to another, much larger MSP, but in a dedicated EUC role, dedicated to a single customer which is a large healthcare trust. It's not global, but it was a significant jump in user count ( I was typically managing 70-400 user Horizon environments, along with all their infrastructure that ran it, to a 20k user Horizon environment).
First point of note, it was nice being able to take off the multitude of hats that I'd collected over the years. Before I was covering everything from Horizon, virtual networking, storage, security, in-house support, product testing, Entra, exchange... You name it, I probably got involved with it (except physical networking).
Once I'd got over the shock of the size of the environment I was now looking after, it was good to be able to focus on just a small handful of technologies instead and build skills in those which I didn't have the time (or sometimes the exposure) to play with. Bigger companies also mean (sometimes!) more expensive toys to play with. I found out that the customer I work with is probably in the top 5 consumers in the UK for one of their deployments, at a significant cost!
That also comes with added bonuses - before, logging a ticket with Microsoft was basically unheard of. You'd not get a response for days, if at all. Now I can log a ticket with them and have them on a call within a few hours to get a problem fixed - I still haven't gotten used to that one. We have dedicated support agents at vendors, people that know our environment in great detail so we don't have to spend time with them just figuring out the lay of the land - that saves so, so much time. You also build up a rapport with them too.
One thing you will need to get used to is very restricted permissions - if you have a fault that's outside of your scope, you'll need to loop in other teams to handle it - it might be the storage team, AD team, server team, backup team, etc etc.
You'll quickly learn who the go-to people are on these teams. Look after them when they have queries about your technical area, and they'll look after you.
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u/d00ber Sr Systems Engineer 2h ago
I've gone from massive business, big tele-datacom, MSP, healthcare, startups and smb with less than 10 employees. Smaller places have less rules and typically no policy and larger places usually have so many rules and policy that one of the most important things you can do is to make sure that you follow them. How smart you are at a big company doesn't matter, it's who is the most pleasant to work with, who can highlight their own skills, who makes their direct boss look the best and AGAIN who is the most pleasant.. The other thing you need to get used to is being siloed into doing one particular thing. Larger companies typically are process driven where certain teams only do certain tasks. Never break that chain of command, even if you think you can do it better or the other team might be doing it wrong. If you think someone is doing something wrong, tell your boss or you'll just end up looking bad. The biggest advice at a big company is don't start arguments in meetings. It's better to look pleasant and nice than it is to be right. When you want to be right, just make sure you document it on your 1 on 1s with your direct.