System Administration Job Opportunities And Technology Trends Analysis

SysAdmin Job Analysis

1.Your task is to search for Job Opportunities relevant to System Administration.

2.You are required to pick up one Important Technology and Conduct Analysis of the Technology trend.

The role that a systems administrator plays within an organisation in this day and age is varied. The general gist however, is that they “manage all the servers, network equipment and any other IT infrastructure for an organisation” (Pramana, 2014). Their responsibilities may include setting up the network for the company, installing applications, troubleshooting, updating the operating system as well as maintaining the many servers that the organisation relies upon in completing their business activities. In essence, system administrators help to ensure that the technology supporting the organisation is running smoothly.

Compared to other professions, system administrators are not required to have a degree in Information Technology or Computer Science. Certification by companies such as Cisco and Microsoft can provide a Systems Administrator with the knowledge that they require, depending on the role that they are required to play. There are different types of systems administrators, each specialising in different areas. As such, qualifications and knowledge required for jobs can vary.

Knowledge of the various technologies relevant to the role of systems administrators however can prove to be an advantage, particularly if they play an important role in the current and future environment of the industry. Server infrastructure has

As such, individuals planning to or currently searching for roles as a systems administrator should take note of the skill sets and the changing role of technology in the business environment.

While a Systems Administrator may be in charge of the aforementioned responsibilities above in the IT department of an organisation, the role that they are involved in may depend on the size of the organisation. Larger organisations with larger Information Technology departments are able to assign different individuals to specialise in a specific type of systems administration whereas smaller companies may require their systems administrator to have broader knowledge across all areas.

Some of these specialised roles within systems administration include:

• A Database Administratormaintains and manages a database These individuals are responsible for upholding the efficient performance of the system as well as the integrity of the data.
• A Network Administrator deals with the business’ network infrastructure such as switchesand routers, and troubleshoots any problems that may arise with these or with computers attached to the network.
• A Security Administratorspecialises in the security of the organisation’s networks and computers. This includes the administration of security procedures such as firewalls, anti-virus programs and security policies, as well the as advising and educating of security measures to the entire organisation.
• A Web Administratorupkeeps web server services for the business that allows for access to web sites, both internally and externally. Tasks may include managing multiple sites and security, as well as configuring software. Software change management may also be another role they play.

Whilst the above roles may overlap with each other, the skills required are different. The diagram below explains some of the many words and phrases linked to that of a system administrator role:

 To include chart of different roles?

With many responsibilities, a variety of skills will be required by the systems administrator to have in their arsenal. An examination of recent job adverts for the position of Systems Administrator has revealed that some of the general technical skills include the following:

• Experience with servers, configuration and troubleshoot
• Active directory design and maintenance
• Support experience with different OS such as Windows, Apple, Linux and UNIX
• Experience in Cloud Base solutions such as VMware
• Networking skills including Cisco routing and switching, patching and firewalls
• Scripting experience with PowerShell, Python, Ruby etc.

Skills in demand

Whilst technical skills are important, System Administrators must have personal skills as they are the go-to-source when problems arise with computers and networks. As such, having skills in the following are also important to consider:

• Good communication
• Problem solving
• Decision making
• Time management
• Critical thinking

That being said, it is a lot to ask for a systems administrator to have all the above skills. Many of the job adverts state the different technologies that they will be dealing with and specify the actual skills they require. Depending on the industry that the organisation operates within and the operating systems that they might use, the required skill sets can very different. For example, within the Finance industry, system administrators may require skills in SAP S/4 HANA, Puppet Enterprise and VMware along with problem solving skills ¹. Whereas in the Education industry, knowledge of maintaining Microsoft Office suites across a large scale, design and implementation of complex networks (both wireless and structured cabling), file system permissions, and support experience for popular operating systems like Windows and Apple (both these OSs being the most popularly used amongst students). Strong client service orientation will also be required as the systems administrator will be dealing with both teachers and students with computer issues ². In the Hospitality industry, some skills required may include strong troubleshooting skills and desktop hardware, maintain user and system security procedures and experience in Opera PMS and Micros POS.

• https://www.adzuna.com.au/details/522091019?v=CAA7C0116B22A296209CA77F707B28F1D59252B5&se=X6wBujYFTu6CC-5HvjRubw
• https://www.seek.com.au/job/33259569?type=standout&tier=no_tier&pos=107&whereid=3000&userqueryid=846c6f778fe1845797508840647ec92d-5632334&ref=beta
• https://chp.tbe.taleo.net/chp03/ats/careers/requisition.jsp?org=BEVERLYHILLSHOTEL&cws=1&rid=2015&source=Indeed.com

Table 1 below compares the skills required for a systems administrator dealing with servers on different operating systems.

Table 1: Different skill set requirements for different OS System Administrators

Skills in demand

1. VMware
2. Scripting
3. Configure and fine tune cloud infrastructure systems
4. Ability to lead and contribute to the development, maintenance, and usage of deployment and task automation.
5. Ability to participate in fast-paced DevOps and SysOps Engineering teams to protect the cloud environment.

Even though it is assumed that the in house server framework is more secure in light of the fact that it is established and maintained inside the office premises. In the event that an organization keeps up a conventional in-house data centre—packed with physical servers, case racks with the other necessary equipment’s — then its IT group has the ultimate  control over the information stored in those servers. On the contrary it is also true that most of the security breaches are mainly due to the lack of control over the access of the different users.

Whereas the server infrastructure that  is used by the Cloud  service providing organizations ensure  the  security of the clients data  and alert them quickly about any adverse impact/ influence on the services. Also, the secure servers are located and maintained at different areas protect information superior to the risk of attack while all the servers are located at a single area or location.  

Analysis of a Selected Technology

The threats of the new viruses and malwares are always a big concern for the system admins of the servers of any business organization. In case of the cloud based service providers they provide a through and fast patching of the security patches to the application used by the servers used in the infrastructure.

Replication and Accessibility are the two factors where server infrastructure used by the cloud service providers scores definitely over the dedicated in house server infrastructure. Due to the very way of resource pool accessible and quicker replication makes by the distributed servers makes the cloud a best answer for applications that require high accessibility for the business organization.

The server infrastructure available to the business organizations provide by the service providers is easily scalable and added vertically as per the requirement of the applications or the clients demand.   

Employees or the IT control teams can use the infrastructure from anyplace, utilizing any PC, tablet, or a smart phone. This server infrastructure helps the Organizations can execute BYOD (bring your own device) principals or approaches for their employees in order to secure the business data.

 The server infrastructure also uses the load balancing mechanism in order support several instances of any application or site. At whatever point the clients or the organizations have the requirement to scale, they can undoubtedly add those required instances to the virtual network and let the load balancer of the server infrastructure deal with partitioning the total we traffic.  The organization can arrange rules for a huge number of conventions and ports by means of our client access.

Again in order to guarantee a superior administration over the infrastructure, the storage systems are also the part of the infrastructure.  The storage systems are designed by considering the performance and the required redundancy for the application, putting away the majority of information twice over the traditional server racks. For this it is important to utilize the faster SAS drives available —and reflect them to increase their execution and efficiency. In the event that the users require a performance boost, the SSD cache  layer will provide that required performance boost precisely what  the users or the clients need.

Developing the migration strategy: Most of the organizations that are planning for migration to the cloud while having a huge amount of business information (in most cases several terabytes), must have a methodology or a plan for moving that information to the cloud selected by the IT team of the organization.  In this scenario the system administrators has a important role to develop a migration strategy that is subject to the recurrence of access and modification to those bulk amount of data. Different other aspects become an integral factor and influence this strategies developed by the system administrators.

It is important for the organization while migrating to the cloud no information is deleted or in-accessible amid the process. These requirements can influence the level of exertion important.  Here the system administrators have an important role which is using their ability to level the expectation of the organization with expenses and time.

Provision of the integration and migration process:  The integration with existing infrastructure is practically unavoidable when moving or migrating to the cloud with all the business application and business data.  The local network or the organizational network frequently needs to interface with the cloud environment. This requires provisioning of both the organizational server environment and cloud resources in order to make the migration successful.

 If the sysadmin or the system administrator of the organization is also the network administrator, setting up the correct associations through data route tables will be vital in the migration process.  Therefore as the system administrator having knowledge about the resource configuration it is important to make and keep a fruitful connection for the data migration and maintenance of the data on the cloud platform.

In addition to that the System administrators are also important as they are responsible for the design and implementation of the hybrid environments that provides the best return on investment in terms of performance and investment done to meet the business requirements of the organization. The most challenging part of the system administrator understands which vendor is best suited for each specific need of the organization. 

Efficient data recovery: in cloud environment the system administrator is also responsible for efficient data recovery and backup. As the cloud services are unavailable when the internet is down thus in order to avoid the business interruption it is important for the system administrator to periodically backup data.      

Other functionalities that are conveyed by the system administrator in the cloud environment includes the following,

• Setting  the  properties for Cloud  based resource Management
• Run Discovery on the cloud resources and define Discovery schedule for recurring Discovery job.
• Acquiring templates and providing approval to some of those templates that may be utilized to create catalog items.
• Configuring the  default lease settings for the different clients
• Setting up pricing rules for the services.
• Defining  and activating  provisioning rules
• Define and activate tagging rules
• Defining   control parameters for cloud resources
• Determining the   schedule for downloading or backing up data without interrupting the accessibility to the data or the application.

• Providing approval to  the different change requests associated with modifications to different  cloud resource
• Managing pending request and approvals for cloud resources for the organization.
• Analysis of the summary data on cloud resource deployments by the organization.
• Controlling and monitoring requests for resources and key metrics for cloud resources used by the organization.

Conclusion

With the evolution of technology and their use in the business environment, system administrators need to continue to learn about new technology trends that may arise. By doing so, the increased skills and knowledge will provide them the capability to meet challenges that organisations face. Demand for individuals with technical knowledge and business acumen continues to grow and the system administrations with skills in both areas will find themselves with organisations offering positions

References

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https://simplercloud.wordpress.com/2014/07/25/what-do-system-administrators-do-all-day/

Indra Pramana (2014)

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