What are the important technologies?

SAs and those aspiring to become one should familiarize themselves with the following technologies:

Automation of system administrative skill set

Cloud and Software as a Service or SaaS, including archiving, spam filtering, CRM, and more

Virtualization

Voice over IP (VoIP) technology

The role of a system administrator is diversifying. It can be a systems engineer, an application engineer, a development engineer, a development engineer, a virtualization engineer, a release engineer, etc.

As cloud computing and virtualization continues to gain momentum, infrastructure engineering must be managed in such a way that automation tools are used. Additionally, IT development is ubiquitous and data analytics as well as applications need to be scaled vertically and horizontally in data centers. Most of the platforms used for this are typically designed by system administrators.

The advent of the cloud has changed the traditional role of ASes. They became engineers specializing in the cloud, but the infrastructure design and basic system services such as mail server, DHCP and DNS remain the same. Other ASes have specialized in cybersecurity. All this means that the role of AS is evolving, diversifying and moving towards systems programming, towards engineering in the cloud and towards infrastructure engineering and performance engineering.

The benefits of automating AS tasks

Automation allows some ASs and network engineers to run large and more complex networks.

To give you a little idea, it will be difficult for it to combine system messages from a network of 1000 devices without having a centralized logging service.

However, it must be said that automation can also make the job of the AS more difficult. For example, when you see a red X from a device in your networking dashboard, it could indicate an issue with either of the following:

The network management software itself

The device hosting the dashboard

The discovery protocol

Routing

The cable connecting the device to the network

The device that displays the red X

Automation has therefore introduced three more levels of abstraction (the first three points mentioned above) between you and the potentially problematic device. This therefore requires training on other technologies and makes troubleshooting more difficult on a daily basis.

Does that mean automation is a bad thing? The answer is 'No', but you (and your management) should be aware that this comes with hidden costs.

The cloud and the XaaS service are growing

Backing up and archiving in the cloud has dramatically reduced routine data management operations that were previously labor intensive. Using the cloud and Xaas (Everything as a Service) can free the AS from many server-centric tasks.

Philip Kizer, president of the League of Professional System Administrators (LOPSA), believes that cloud computing makes the role of AS more important.

Thanks to this, he can defend the interests of the company and filter out external services that do not meet his needs. Without an experienced AS, companies are at the mercy of service providers, with their many business arguments ”. Of course, for this to be the case, the AS must understand not only the computer technology, but also the real needs of the business.

Virtualization and VoIP

Virtualization adds further levels of abstraction and creates a tangle of virtual networks. This means that an AS should know about routing and switching at a more advanced level than before.

As you know, virtualization and cloud computing are all the rage right now, and ASes are the lucky ones to administer these emerging technologies. They still have a chance to survive in this field if they manage to combine their existing skills with the new skills of the future.

VoIP, or “Voice over Internet Protocol”, for example, has been a very popular technology for the past ten years. This technology makes it possible to transmit both sound and text through a computer network. But its main advantage is that it is economical and can be developed for quality intercommunication between the employees of an organization. The concept is to implement audio streaming, but this also presents security vulnerabilities when communicating between two or more people.

Understanding the dynamics of the load in the network is essential if the AS is to successfully implement and implement VoIP. Indeed, don't forget that today's users do not tolerate the downtime of voice over IP, because they have become accustomed to traditional telephony networks which had a so-called five "nine" availability, that is, networks that worked 99.999% of the time. Thus, the role of the AS is no longer limited to the implementation of VoIP, that is to say to allow effective communication, but also to counter the possible cybercriminal threats that result from it.