system administration (job) Activities performed by a system administrator (or "admin", "sysadmin", "site admin") such as monitoring security configuration, managing allocation of user names and passwords, monitoring disk space and other resource use, performing backups, and setting up new hardware and software.
system administrators often also help users, though in a large organisation this may be a separate job. Compare postmaster, sysop, system management, systems programmer. [Other tasks?] Last updated: 1999-05-02