Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for IT System Analyst

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking a proactive IT System Analyst who bridges business needs and technical delivery. The IT System Analyst will be responsible for requirements gathering, systems design, configuration and administration, incident resolution, integration work, and continuous improvement of enterprise infrastructure and applications. This role requires strong analytical ability, experience with on-prem and cloud technologies (Windows/Linux, Active Directory, virtualization, AWS/Azure), SQL and scripting skills, and a consultative approach to stakeholders across business and IT teams.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

IT Support / Help Desk Technician with 1–3 years of hands-on troubleshooting experience.
Junior Systems Administrator who has managed servers, AD, or virtualization.
Business Analyst or Application Support Specialist with exposure to IT operations and requirements gathering.

Advancement To:

Senior IT System Analyst / Lead Systems Analyst
Solutions Architect / Systems Architect
IT Infrastructure Manager or Technical Project Manager
Cloud Architect or Enterprise Architect

Lateral Moves:

DevOps Engineer / Platform Engineer
Network Engineer or Security Analyst
Application Support / ERP Functional Analyst

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Gather, document and validate business and technical requirements by working directly with business stakeholders, product owners, and technical teams; translate requirements into detailed system specifications, user stories, and acceptance criteria suitable for developers and operations.
Analyze existing IT systems, configurations and workflows (on-prem and cloud) to identify gaps, propose optimizations, and design secure, scalable solutions that align with enterprise architecture and compliance policies.
Configure, deploy and maintain server and application environments across Windows Server and Linux platforms, ensuring patching, hardening, and lifecycle management follow ITIL and organizational standards.
Manage identity and access services (Active Directory, LDAP, SSO/SAML, IAM) including user provisioning/deprovisioning, group and role management, privilege audits, and integration with cloud identity providers.
Troubleshoot complex incidents across application, network and infrastructure layers—perform root cause analysis, document findings, and implement preventive measures to reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).
Design, implement and support integrations between on-prem systems and cloud services using RESTful APIs, web services, middleware, and ETL processes; ensure data integrity and secure transport.
Build, maintain and optimize SQL queries, stored procedures and database configurations for operational systems; support database administration tasks including backups, restores, performance tuning and capacity planning.
Develop and maintain automation and scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python) to support configuration management, deployment pipelines, monitoring automation, log collection and repetitive operational tasks.
Participate in the planning and execution of platform migrations (on-prem → cloud or cloud-to-cloud), virtualization projects (VMware, Hyper-V), and upgrades with minimal downtime and well-documented rollback plans.
Implement monitoring, logging and alerting solutions (Splunk, ELK, SCOM, Prometheus) with actionable dashboards and escalation policies to meet SLAs and provide operational transparency.
Coordinate change management activities—author change requests, assess risk, schedule maintenance windows, and communicate impacts to stakeholders while ensuring successful change execution and post-change validation.
Support disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity planning by developing runbooks, performing failover tests, validating backups, and documenting RTO/RPO expectations with stakeholders.
Enforce security controls and compliance frameworks (PCI, SOC, ISO) by applying hardening standards, conducting vulnerability assessments, and collaborating with security teams to remediate findings.
Manage vendor relationships and third-party support contracts for hardware, software, and cloud services; escalate effectively and validate vendor deliverables against SLAs.
Lead or support cross-functional technical projects, create project plans, estimate effort, track milestones and deliverables, and provide regular status reports to project sponsors.
Conduct systems capacity analysis and forecasting for compute, storage and network resources; create recommendations for right-sizing and cost optimization across cloud and on-prem environments.
Author and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, standard operating procedures (SOPs), architecture diagrams and knowledge base articles to improve team knowledge transfer and onboarding.
Provide Tier 2 / Tier 3 support for escalated issues, mentor junior engineers, and participate in on-call rotations to ensure 24/7 operational coverage where required.
Validate and test new application releases and infrastructure changes in development/staging environments; define test plans, perform regression and performance testing, and coordinate user acceptance testing (UAT).
Work with product and business teams to define SLAs, KPIs and success metrics for system performance, uptime and user experience; actively track and communicate performance against targets.
Drive continuous improvement initiatives by analyzing incident trends, conducting post-incident reviews, and implementing automation and process changes to reduce recurring issues and improve time-to-value.

Secondary Functions

Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
Assist procurement with technical evaluations of new infrastructure and SaaS solutions.
Provide input to budgeting and cost allocation decisions for infrastructure and licensing.
Facilitate cross-team workshops to align technical solutions with business objectives.
Provide training sessions and enablement for application owners and end users on system capabilities and best practices.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Systems analysis and requirements gathering for enterprise IT environments.
Strong administration experience with Windows Server and Active Directory.
Linux system administration (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS) and familiarity with shell scripting.
Virtualization technologies: VMware vSphere, Hyper-V, or KVM.
Cloud platform proficiency: AWS and/or Microsoft Azure (compute, networking, IAM, storage).
SQL expertise (T-SQL, PL/SQL), database performance tuning and backup/restore procedures.
Scripting/automation: PowerShell, Bash, Python, or equivalent for operational automation.
Experience integrating systems via RESTful APIs, SOAP, middleware and message queues.
Monitoring and logging tools: Splunk, ELK/ELK Stack, Prometheus, Nagios or Azure Monitor.
Configuration management and IaC experience (Ansible, Terraform, CloudFormation).
Networking fundamentals: TCP/IP, DNS, DHCP, routing, firewalls, VPNs and load balancers.
Familiarity with ITSM tools (ServiceNow, JIRA Service Desk) and ITIL processes.
Security awareness: vulnerability scanning, patch management, encryption and endpoint controls.
Experience with identity management and SSO technologies (SAML, OAuth, Okta, Azure AD).
Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices.

(Include certifications such as Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, AWS Certified Solutions Architect, CompTIA Network+/Security+, ITIL Foundation, or relevant vendor certs as a plus.)

Soft Skills

Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with attention to detail and root cause orientation.
Excellent verbal and written communication; able to translate technical details for non-technical stakeholders.
Customer service mindset and proven ability to manage stakeholder expectations and priorities.
Project management and organization skills—able to juggle multiple initiatives and deliverables.
Collaboration and team orientation; works effectively with engineering, product, security and operations teams.
Proactive ownership and accountability for end-to-end operational outcomes.
Adaptability and continuous learning mindset in fast-changing technology environments.
Critical thinking and ability to make pragmatic decisions under pressure.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related field; or equivalent professional experience.

Preferred Education:

Master's degree in a technical or business discipline or professional certifications (Azure/AWS certifications, ITIL, CISSP, CCNA) that demonstrate domain expertise.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Information Systems
Software Engineering
Cybersecurity
Network Engineering
Business Administration (with IT focus)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3–7 years of progressive IT systems, infrastructure, or application support/analysis experience.

Preferred: 5+ years supporting enterprise-level systems, with demonstrable experience in systems integration, cloud migrations, automation and incident management in medium-to-large organizations. Hands-on experience in cross-functional projects, strong stakeholder management, and a track record of improving operational reliability and performance.