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What do system administrators do?



Almost every company employs system administrators. I have noticed that is it not always obvious to everyone what these system admins do all day.

Therefore I created the list below with tasks that system admins usually do in daily practice:

  • Installation and maintenance of hardware and software;
  • Daily checks of the systems;
  • Organising a fast repair of the service in case of an incident or emergency;
  • Applying changes based on RFC's;
  • Monitoring systems;
  • Creating and maintaining scripts;
  • Creating and checking daily back-ups;
  • On demand restoring of data from back-ups;
  • Performance tuning;
  • Installing patches;
  • Checking the security of systems and keeping it up-to-date;
  • Patching systems and firmware;
  • User account management;
  • Answering second-line technical questions;
  • Documenting systems and keeping documentation up-to-date;
  • Keeping informed about their professional knowledge.

So, be nice to your system administrators: they are very busy!



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About Sjaak Laan

Sjaak Laan

I am 45 years old and married with Angelina. We have 3 children of 12, 7 and 5 years old. We live in The Netherlands, in a place called Drachten

I work for Logica as Principal IT Architect. I have 20 years IT experience.

I own the following certificates:

ITAC Master Certified IT Architect

CISSP_logo CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional)


TOGAF8_Certified_web TOGAF Certified Architect



I am a member of the:


I manage my business contacts using Linkedin.


I can be reached through sjaak.laan [ a t ] gmail [dot] com.

This site states my opinion only, and not nessecarily the opinion of my employer or of the clients I work for.