Cloud Computing

The systems administrator role:
The systems administrator role is perhaps one of the earliest in technology, at least as far as the implementation of a system goes. In the earliest days of computing, electronic technical professionals built prototype computers. In time, the systems administration role owned the installation, configuration, operation and tuning of these systems once they went into production and use on a larger scale.
A few of the tasks associated with the role are:
1. Planning, installing and configuring systems.
2. Planning, designing and creating storage, networking and other system components.
3. Planning, designing and implementing high availability and disaster recovery for each system.
4. Maintaining and monitoring systems.
5. Implementing performance tuning systems based on monitoring.
6. Re-balancing workloads across servers based on monitoring.
7. Securing systems, networks and individual computers based on requirements and implementation.
8. Planning, implementing and controlling user and account security rights and restrictions.
How the cloud changes things:
The systems administrator has the same concerns and impacts of the cloud as the DBA and the systems architect. They need to educate themselves on the options within this new option, try a few test solutions out and of course work with others on various parts of the implementation.