System analysts and Data analysts are two different prospects in the business industry.
The roles and responsibilities are totally different for these two designations. The System analyst or business analyst is more equipped technically and all the business processes. He must possess strong technical knowledge and industry processes. Most of his work is to bridge the gap between stakeholders and the organization. He is the person who is involved right from requirement gathering till the delivery of the project.
Rather I would say, he intact the project in different phases of the project life cycle by communicating with different teams.
However, in a few companies, there are different roles as a system analyst and business analyst. In that scenario system analysts work only on the technical part of the project and business analysts have a brief knowledge on the technical part of the project and he works more on the business front of the organization.
Moving towards data analysts, they are separate teams in the organization who are playing a vital role in analyzing the huge data. Data analysts must aware of the different databases, data structures. Their analysis helps organizations to make the proper decision based on observations.
They are responsible for data modeling, data mapping and structuring of the data. This team also involves a bunch of statisticians. Their main job is to provide meaningful insights by analyzing the pattern of the data and give solutions for business problems. They should know the different techniques to analyze the data based on different parameters. They also have an understanding of advance mathematics and data engineering.
Based on their observations they need to prepare the reports and charts or graphs showing the statistics. The higher the skilled persona, the more the chances for the organization to take the informed decision for the business.
However, the meaning of the data analysts and business analysts vary from organization to organization. In small organizations, business analysts work also as data analysts. But in the big organizations where a company is more concerned about the big data, they will exclusively hire data analysts with the required skillset.
One should make a smart decision while choosing to make a carrier between data analysts and system analysts and take a proper step ahead to get their dream job.