System administrators and IT operations teams operate and maintain the technical environment in which Assets live — servers, cloud services, networks and applications. They typically act as Control owner for many technical controls such as patching, access provisioning, backups and monitoring.

Because they hold privileged access, system administrators are also part of the and can be an insider Threat agent if their access is misused, whether intentionally or through error. They are usually the first responders when a Vulnerability is discovered or an incident occurs.