IT Administrator at The African Economic Research Consortium (AERC)

Duties And Responsibilities

Systems Administration

• Develop, deploy, and maintain appropriate business applications that support critical business processes to facilitate operations and decision making such as MS Navision or custom-made systems like Learning Management System, Research Management System, etc.
• Install new/ rebuild existing servers and configure IT infrastructure including network, servers, storage, endpoints etc. in accordance with standards and project/operational requirements.
• Ensuring systems’ availability and capacity planning to meet evolving programme operational requirements and in conformity to best practices.
• Manage, configure and administer on premise virtualized system environment and cloud infrastructure including MS Navision, Office365, Azure and AWS
• Contribute to and maintain system standards through configuration management, enforcement of change procedures, integrity monitoring, periodic compliance reviews in line with best practices.
• Research and recommend innovative, and where possible automated approaches for system administration tasks for cost efficiency.
• Management of the ICT infrastructure during the office move to the TDB building

IT Enabled Implementations

• Working with departments/units to identify needs, devise requirements, assess process changes and propose solutions for evaluation.
• Coordinating technical development, testing, and implementation of systems in outsourced systems development projects.
• Assist in developing enterprise data model and implementation of business analytics tools using Power BI.
• Research and implement innovative solutions in response to emerging user needs for new systems or changes to existing systems as required.

Operations and Support

• Provide first level support including investigating and troubleshooting Help desk issues. Proactively coordinating and communicating with impacted users.
• Perform continuous system monitoring, verifying the integrity and availability of information resources, and key processes e.g. reviewing, analyzing and correlating event logs for incident resolution.
• Perform backup and replication operations and carry out recovery testing to ensure compliance with DRP and BCP requirements.
• Management of external service providers for contract management, negotiations and to troubleshoot and resolve infrastructure including network, storage and unified communications incidents within MTTR specifications.
• Provide advisory, support, and set up of all organizational technical workshops, plenary meetings, and major conferences.
• Identify requisite training needs in any of the implemented systems and assist in the development and implementation of the training.

Maintenance

• Apply OS patches and upgrades on a regular basis, and upgrade administrative tools and utilities. Configure / add new services as necessary.
• Develop and maintain operational, configuration and other standard operating procedures.
• Perform routine performance tuning, upgrades and resource optimization to meet processing, storage and retrieval capacity demands
• Perform periodic performance reporting to support capacity planning
• Maintain an asset inventory of all systems connected to the network, devices and software’s Maintain data center environment and implement remote monitoring tools.

IT Security

• Assist in ensuring the effectiveness of information security controls and continuous fidelity of the overall information security posture.
• Support in deploying and maintaining anti-exploitation tools such as Data Execution Prevention (DEP), Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR), virtualization/containerization, etc.
• Accountable for business continuity and effective user support of the IT infrastructure and systems. (Provision of 1st and 2nd level support to staff)

Qualification And Experience

• Should have experience in IT project implementation, PRINCE2 or PMP certification preferred.
• System Administration/System Engineer certifications in Microsoft. ITIL foundation certification is a plus
• Working knowledge of Microsoft Dynamics Navision, Microsoft CRM and Power BI implementation and administration. MS Dynamics Navision related certification is a plus.
• Should also have experience in systems and network security. CISSP certification is preferred.
• Experience in administering Office 365, Azure, AWS and Google cloud infrastructure and services. A certification in any one of these platforms is a plus