Introduction to Becoming a System Administrator

00:01

Hey, everyone, welcome back to the course in this video. We're gonna talk about the system administrator job role so we'll talk about what a system administrator is. We'll talk about some of the common job responsibilities that you might do as a system admin. We'll also talk about some of the common skills that you're gonna need to be successful at the job.

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We'll talk about common certifications that a sys admin might have,

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and we'll also talk about the general salary range forces sad mons with salary range on all of these videos. I just want to make note that these can vary and they can vary significantly based off where you live in the world, as well as where you live in your country and the particular company, as well as

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the particular responsibilities of the job role. So you'll see kind of a bigger range

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for is this admin on the salary and just know that it doesn't mean that you're going to get a salary in that range. You could get less. You could even get Mawr. It's just kind of a guideline for you to understand how lucrative this particular job role might be if you're interested in it.

01:00

So what is this system administrator or sys? Admin will basically thes air the individuals that are responsible for the infrastructure of the organization's technology so they're responsible for things like the configuration of different systems maintaining those systems on a day to day basis. In some instances, a sys admin might also be doing

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some help desk type of work, depending on the size of the organization. But generally speaking, there, the server people there, the people in there doing the infrastructure type of work and not necessarily answering the phone for the help desk roles.

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These also working with different endpoints besides just servers.

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So what are some of the common responsibilities you might have as a sys? Admin? Well, number one being automation. So you don't want to do every single task possible manually. So you're gonna be responsible for figuring out what you can actually automate. Thio either speed things up or to save your time where you could go work on other things.

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Patch management is a very, very important part of it, making sure that you're keeping software up to date, making sure that you're identifying once if you've got a security team and your organization making sure that once they identify vulnerabilities and they say, Hey, update this software, apply these patches that you actually do it as this assignment.

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And if you're in a smaller company where you're kind of handling all that stuff, where you that sort of Jack or Jane of all trades?

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Making sure that you have a good patch management process in place, performing things like server health checks, just making sure that there's no maintenance needed and making sure if something needs replaced that it is getting replaced. Same thing if you're using the cloud environment that your organization, making sure that you're checking all your cloud infrastructure and making sure things are up to date

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performing backups of systems and being able to restore from backup, especially when we're talking about things like disaster recovery,

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making sure that the applications are compatible with other

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applications as well as the infrastructure if you have in place. An example of this is a health care company. I used to work at a long time ago. They were a smaller organization and they were looking to move to the cloud and what they found was that one of the applications, which was a pharmacy application, wasn't compatible with

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later versions of Windows Server in the later versions of Windows Server were required

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to actually implement the cloud environment. So

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they had to figure out a new solution for the pharmacy software. And that way they could actually transition most of their infrastructure to the cloud. So as a salmon. Interesting to make sure that you're testing and identifying if there's any compatibility issues of those different applications and then, of course, hardening systems, right, So going back to things like patch management

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removing services, we don't need removing processes. We don't need locking down user accounts. So if we don't need someone to have administrative access, we make sure they don't have administrative access. So all of these air, some common responsibilities for us, a sad, been.

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So what about skills?

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What are some common skills? Well, it's good to have an understanding of networking. You don't have to be at the level of like a network architect necessarily is a statement, but you really need to understand how data is flowing across the network so you can identify how you can best help protect it and, again, a smaller organizations.

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I worked in a blended role. Where was Sys admin work network and engineer

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slash admin work slash architect work.

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It was also security work as an analyst work

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as well as pen testing like it was kind of a jack of all trades, so to speak, role so at a smaller company might be doing a lot of this stuff. So it's important to build that skill set

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for yourself so you could be more successful in the role.

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Also, we talk about Patch management, right? So you need to be comfortable with implementing patches both on a test network and then also rolling about to production and identifying if there's any issues with the patch in the production environment being comfortable performing backups and also recovering from those backups

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being comfortable with different operating systems. So things like Lennox Windows to some extent Mac, but primarily in the enterprise environment, Windows and Lennox,

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some scripting skills, air helpful for the automation part of things so you can automate different task you're doing, It's It's also good to have experience in the command line as well as experience of power shelves. If you're gonna be working with Windows Server, which a lot of bigger companies are working with. In fact, most companies I know of off the top of my head are working with

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Windows server environments, at least in some capacity.

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So power show is gonna be an important part of that as well and understanding. Virtual ization. That building a skill set?

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Uh,

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probably not so much with, like, virtual box, but mostly with VM ware in the in the typical enterprise environment as well as in some instances, hyper V

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and then understanding

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mawr cloud related things. The building skill sets in that so things like containers, kubernetes, etcetera and understanding different cloud environments like a W s is your and even Google Cloud

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as well as

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depending the size of your organization. It's a good idea for you to build some skill set and intrusion detection, monitoring and, you know, intrusion detection, prevention, firewalls, etcetera, etcetera. So kind of more of the security side of things.

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We're just understanding how those things work can really help us assist admin.

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So what about certifications? Well, there's a whole lot of different ones you might see SS admin get,

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including a place which I don't have listed here. But that's typically more help desk type of thing. And that's why it's not on my list.

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So is your administrator Associate is a cloud cert

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for, uh, where Microsoft kind of went. Is there on more of the job rule certifications now? So they've taken away things like the M. C s A. Which was the Microsoft Certified Systems admin. Or they also took away the M. C S C, which was the, uh to a systems engineer, the Microsoft Certified Systems engineer.

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So they've taken away. Those have gone from or more of the work role type of thing. So is your administrator associate is one search you might want to get as a sys admin. And, of course, some of your fundamental search like network plus Lennox, plus even security Plus to understand from the security side of things.

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If you're

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working with a lot of virtualization and you're interested in

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getting a certification around that VM, where does have a certified professional assert and there are some people that get that as well that work is too sad Mons

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And then, of course, red hat Linux certifications. So the Red Hat certified system administrators. Another one is well again for most tech rules. You don't have to have certifications,

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but some of these are good toe. Have to kind of get your foot in the door and get past that HR filter that we usually see.

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So let's talk about salary now. So you noticed a range here in the U. S. Is pretty wide, right? 50,000

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up to over 160,000. In fact, there's a few

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sys admin is I know that they're very experienced, so these were not entry level. They're very experienced, and they're making a little over 2 20 base salary right now. So, yes, you could make its lucrative. You could make a good amount of money. Realistically, starting out, you're probably looking at

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the 50,000 range. Maybe 40,000, depending on the size of the company, may be up to like 60 or 70 if it's a larger enterprise. So again, it's a big range. A lot depends on your skill set,

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your experience and also your ability to negotiate in an interview. So don't forget about those soft skills and any of these roles that we discussed in this course,

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soft skills like negotiation skills, negotiating your salary,

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vacate extra vacation time. Whatever those things are important. Communication skills are very important as well.

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So just a quick, quick question here for you. Common skills that are needed as a sys admin include which of the following ones is that networking? Is it hardening of systems or is a disaster recovery?

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All right, so you get all of them, you are correct. Right again. You wanna have a good understanding of networking and how data flows across a network. You also want to be able to harden systems and make them stronger against attack to help try to mitigate some of the attacks you might face. And also you need to understand how to both perform backups and restore from backups in the context of disaster recovery.