Top 5 Technical Skills for Networking Pros

Continued professional development is key to networking career growth. Use our list to make sure your skills are up to date.

Whether you’re looking for a new job or just want to keep up to date in your current one, there are some technical skills that you can’t be without. Here’s our roundup of the top five technical skills today's networking pros need.

1. Enterprise Security

It’s not the most glamorous networking role, but the threats out there continue to evolve faster than most companies can keep up. And if there is a security breach, you know which IT team will be first in front of the firing squad.

It can be difficult to implement an effective security model and tedious to keep it current, but it’s essential to protect your business from malicious activity or simple carelessness on the part of employees. Look for ways to optimize your security strategy and implementation. Once your security strategy is in place, you shouldn’t have to work harder, just smarter. Check your own skills in this area and brush up on analytics, automation, system integrations, and current threats.

2. Monitoring

There are dozens of different ways that you can monitor your network. No one can expect to be an expert in everything. What tools and techniques does your company use? Do you really feel confident analyzing the logs? More importantly, do you know what to do if you spot an error or something goes wrong? Checking log files can become routine and seem less than deserving of your full attention, especially if nothing much happens. But on the day that you do notice something fishy, make sure you know what should happen next and who else needs to be involved to help diagnose and resolve the problem.

3. Virtualization

Isn’t everything virtual now? Well, no. Although we hear a lot about virtualization, many companies have a long way to go before they maximize the savings that virtualization can bring. What is your company’s approach to server and network virtualization, and how can you influence this? Given the requirement on companies to cut costs and reduce carbon emissions through lower utility bills, being the go-to person on the team for virtualization solutions can prove a big career boost.

4. Cloud management

If you work for a top secret government agency with servers in concrete bunkers, you probably won't have much need for cloud services. But many companies are embracing public and private cloud solutions. The network requirements for this type of infrastructure differ from the traditional approach, so make sure that you're clued into how working in the cloud affects your workforce. As employees adopt cloud solutions and their expectations change, you’ll have to make sure that your network can meet their new needs.

5. Access control

Access control is a networking fundamental. You have to control who's on your network and what they can access, and you need to know how they got there. But with the Bring Your Own Device trend showing no signs of slowing down, your access control requirements just got a lot more complicated. You should have a strategy for letting people access corporate data on their own devices, and clear policies about what is and is not appropriate. You should also consider putting group policies in place that allow you to wipe corporate information from their personal devices remotely, for example if they leave the company.

Unfortunately, many employees don’t understand why they can’t get all their work files on their personal iPads, and no one likes carrying around a work tablet and a personal tablet at the same time. On top of that, we all have to remember more passwords, so single sign on and biometrics are becoming attractive ways to access the network. Access control methods are getting smarter. Networking pros should keep up with the latest trends and make sure that the existing policies reflect the way that business users want to work while balancing security requirements.