The top five most popular network industry skills in 2018

In the rapidly evolving IT field, professionals are always on the lookout for new skills that businesses need. For those working in the networking industry, the types of skills that businesses demand will change in 2018.

Gone are the days when network administrators could simply rely on configuring and managing router and switch hardware. Today, network professionals are expected to have a wider range of IT skills and be able to use a variety of advanced network tools. Here are five of the top skills you may need to master in 2018.

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Application Analysis

In the past, network administrators only cared about Layers 1-4 of the OSI model. They paid little attention to upper layer protocol information because the network could not distinguish between data flows far up the stack.

However, with visibility into modern networks and the ability to make routing decisions based on information collected at Layer 7, network engineers are now responsible for analyzing application behavior as data traverses the network. This information is extremely useful when performing tasks such as mapping application dependencies, identifying transport performance bottlenecks, and building complex network policies.

Network access policy enforcement

A sound security strategy starts at the edge of the network. Identifying, authenticating, and authorizing users are best handled at the network level, and for years, some enterprise organizations have largely ignored these security platforms. Recently, IT leaders have begun to understand their necessity and have begun to increase their budgets in this area. This is especially true for enterprises that must adhere to increasingly stringent compliance regulations. The implementation and management of tools such as enterprise mobility management (EMM) or identity and access management (IAM) are expected to see significant growth in the next four to five years. This means that skills in this area are likely to be sought after.

Multi-cloud architecture

One of the biggest technology trends over the past few years has been the widespread adoption of cloud computing services disrupting the enterprise networking landscape. In fact, many organizations have become so accustomed to using cloud computing that they are developing new production strategies by building multi-cloud strategies. The goal is to deploy applications, services, and other computing resources across multiple service providers to achieve higher performance, reduce costs, and achieve elasticity. The responsibility of creating the most efficient data flow between cloud services and end users falls to the network engineer, which requires designing appropriate failover, disaster recovery, and understanding direct connectivity options with cloud service providers.

IoT Cybersecurity

Early on, the industry tried to implement protections from the IoT hardware. Unfortunately, this proved ineffective because it was difficult to manage and ensure firmware patches for hundreds of thousands of devices. New security architectures place the responsibility for IoT security directly on the network, including virtualization and segmentation from other IoT technologies, and the use of advanced software-defined technologies to centralize IoT management.

SaaS Network Monitoring

Since the dawn of cloud computing, network engineers have been responsible for monitoring the performance of network connections between enterprises and IaaS or PaaS service providers. However, new network performance monitoring tools also enable network engineers to monitor access to SaaS providers, and network experts familiar with these tools will find their skills in demand.

SaaS performance monitoring tools like Solarwinds NetPath and ThousandEyes Cloud Agent can provide detailed visualization and analysis of where latency or misconfiguration may be causing problems between your employees and your public service provider. These tools are also great for creating performance baselines over time, which can be very useful for quickly identifying where problems are occurring.