Responsibilities may vary between organizations, but installing new hardware, on-site servers, enforcing licensing agreements, software-network interactions as well as network integrity and resilience are some of the key areas of focus.
The role of the network administrator can vary significantly depending on an organization's size, location, and socioeconomic considerations.
In smaller organizations, they are typically involved in the procurement of new hardware, the rollout of new software, maintaining disk images for new computer installs, making sure that licenses are paid for and up to date for software that needs it, maintaining the standards for server installations and applications, monitoring the performance of the network, checking for security breaches, and poor data management practices.
In other organizations, some of these roles mentioned are carried out by system administrators.
As with many technical roles, network administrator positions require a breadth of technical knowledge and the ability to learn the intricacies of new networking and server software packages quickly.