High Scalability Building bigger, faster, more reliable websites.

This website has been a great resource for helping me to understand the successful (and failed) scalable network designs from organizations that have actually done it, but I haven't seen any explicite explanations about secure remote administration of these systems.

I understand that the *nix people love to SSH, and the windows gang has their RDP, but how does one go about creating a network architecture that both allows one to manage their systems and does its best to avoid hacker interest? As I imagine, no big website will have the SSH/RDP/FTP ports open on the web server, so how is it that they go about remotely administering their geographically diverse groups of servers securely?