The network sector of IT has shown surprising resilience. While other hardware-dominated sectors have faltered, networking has held its ground. It still boasts a sizeable and engaged community. Experience the presence of the year network world + Interop show and releases such as Enterprise Networking Planet.
And the reason is simple: whatever the infrastructure, cloud or on-premises, virtualized or not, there’s no getting away from the need for fiber, cabling, ethernet, Wireless Internet accessand other means to get the data from point A to points B, C and Z.
Let’s look at some of the top trends in networking jobs:
See more: The network market
1. Learn about the latest network technologies and protocols
Russell Davis, Chief Operating Officer at vicinity, expects some changes to network job requirements in 2022. Most network engineers at larger companies deal with an interesting mix of technologies local area networks (LANs). But basically it’s mostly about Ethernet, TCP/IP and Fiber Channel (FC). On the wide area network (WAN) side, it’s still basically TCP/IP and maybe some WAN optimizers.
“The growth of data at the edge and the need to process and/or move that data will likely require network engineers to learn some new skills,” Davis said. “The increasing use of UDP (user datagram protocol) Technologies like QUIC (Fast UDP internet connections) from the hyperscalers is an example of how fundamentally networks must change to support the changing landscape of data generation and consumption.”
Therefore, it’s time for both veteran network workers and new hires to ensure they are comfortable with these newer network innovations.
2. Storage Networking Opportunities
Davis also noted that protocols such as RDMA over Converged Ethernet (RoCE) and InfiniBand over Ethernet (IBoE) have gained importance for storage networks. Networking professionals should ensure they add these skills to their repertoire.
“Storage networking has long known that the most effective network uses RDMA technologies – this is becoming more common for storage vendors and when combined with technologies like GPU Direct adds even more complexity to networking capabilities,” Davis said.
3. Centralization of network monitoring
These surveillance networks need to ensure they update their capabilities quickly due to the pace of innovation. You need to get acquainted with modern centralization network monitoring Processes essential to minimize the complexity of modern networks and dependencies. IT departments can no longer rely on a hodgepodge of tools to map and monitor their networks. Instead, they need to know how to correlate data from disparate resources and get the big picture using network monitoring platforms that integrate with other monitoring tools and have plenty of built-in automation capabilities.
“A network monitoring solution that allows you to integrate with ticketing and communications solutions improves how your team collaborates, monitors, and troubleshoots,” said Sharon Abraham, product marketer at ManageEngine. “This helps you centralize your network monitoring processes and avoid the overhead and performance issues of deploying different independent tools.”
4. Security Opportunities
In all IT areas Internet security Skills are becoming increasingly important. The company can no longer rely on a separate security team to protect networks. Everyone in IT and actually every employee has to bear this responsibility. Networking is no exception. Network workers are now expected to fully understand the security implications of their actions and take care to avoid deployment or configuration errors that leave avenues of attack open.
“Because the network is so important to cybersecurity, it’s likely this year that network engineers will be expected to contribute almost equally to securing the networks they design and support,” Davis said.
5. Container Technology
A major trend impacting network careers is this one Kubernetes and software-defined perimeter (SDP)-enhanced stateful containers will make multicloud the architectural standard for container deployment.
The vision of multicloud is to be able to leverage workloads across different clouds based on the cloud type that best fits the workload. This vision was typically dependent on a virtual private network (VPN) to connect multiple cloud environments. That’s a problem because traditional VPN software solutions don’t perform well in hybrid and multicloud systems because they weren’t designed for that. They are complex to configure and expose parts of the network, creating a lateral attack surface for the network.
“Networking professionals should learn as much as they can about a new class of containers with built-in SDP security that will enable them to help their organizations eliminate these problems and revolutionize the current multicloud deployment model,” said Don Boxley, CEO and co-founder at DH2i. “Network professionals are well positioned for promotions and raises when they know how to leverage this new SDP-enhanced container to create intelligent endpoint multicloud container environments that can seamlessly span clouds without the added cost and complexities of a VPN and virtually no attack surface.”
For those who really want to differentiate themselves from their competitors, Boxley added, they should learn how to combine Kubernetes and SDP-enhanced containers so their organizations can build multicloud Kubernetes clusters with unparalleled portability. This new multicloud deployment will make it easy for them/their organizations to move from one public cloud provider to another.
With SDP-enhanced database containers, network professionals in medium and large enterprises can achieve high availability (HA) and DR at the database level with automatic failover in Kubernetes. This allows them to deploy stateful containers to build new and innovative applications while improving operations by almost zero Recovery Time Goal (RTO) to more efficiently provide better products and services at a lower cost.
See more: Networking Careers
