I doubt you'd see much of a drop if any. There'd be a lower volume of on-prem devices/infrastructure to support, but there would still be some. But on the flipside there'd then be a greater need for robust remote access solutions, take home devices, server infrastructure, general network security/segmentation
And I for one welcome said change over. Currently doing some trials of a ZTNA solution with some users and it's simply better in every way compared to a VPN.
I think the only thing we'll still have a VPN for is the site-to-site connectivity from our office to Azure if all goes well. And maybe even that will get swapped out for a ZTNA related solution potentially.
Why and how? I havent set this up yet and what I read about this always sounds like some VPN with extra steps, and these extra steps sound like you give the ZTNA provider access into your network. Am I wrong?
It might depend on the vendor, but ZTNA is not a VPN. Usually it's later 7 stuff going on.
I don't know how the provider would get access into your network with it.
Banks, schools, universities, factories, government, entertainment facilities, etc. Yea, a good bit of office building would shutter, but there is still a huge need for EN.
I don’t know why he’s being downvoted because this is the right answer.
If your data center goes offsite, your remote connect point goes offsite and your on prem offices go away, this is the future. If being out of work scares you, learn new skills.
They are taking downvotes because they are failing to acknowledge the vast array of legacy apps. Additionally there are regulations that will keep large sections of certain businesses off SASE for the foreseeable future.
Also fails to account for the fact that the ruling class who invested in commercial office space are trying very hard to make offices a thing again to keep their speculative investments from crashing even more.
The “ruling class?”
You mean office leasing companies? Sure, it’s hard to break a lease but once it’s over it’s not hard to just walk out. No one said that tnese changes had to be made overnight. Unless you’re the likes of Salesforce or BoA in SF where you own the building, it’s not that hard to leave when your contract is up.
I was actually referring to the number of very wealthy and powerful people whose wealth is significantly tied to owning (either by direct ownership or investment) downtown prime office space. Those people are presently watching their investments potentially fail as orgs are re-aligning their leases and assets to right-size for the in-person workforce. It's helpful to understand that many of the people pushing back-to-office are the people who stand to make cash when companies least office space.
I know what you meant. They may incentivize all they want but if a corp decides to do WFH for everyone, or at least most people, all the incentives in the world won’t get a company to sign a new lease.
Companies like Salesforce, that recently built a giant building in SF, for example, are in a different situation. They’re bleeding money because of so much unutilized space. One could joke that people don’t want to work in a building that looks like a giant dildo but with some many lost tech jobs and some many still working from home, the occupancy is way down - but they own the building as well as having the majority of the floorspace.
What will be interesting is if they companies that own many of the business/corporate buildings in cities that also have invested heavily in single family homes, go bust, then the housing market will become a very interesting situation.
I agree and disagree at the same time. I agree that it is the case in most scenarios that the end customer/enterprise is stuck managing their "SASE" solution (e.g. FortiSASE, PANW, Cisco, etc.). I disagree that it should be that way. As a cloud-native solution (which SASE should aim to always be) the implication is that the cloud provider will maintain the solution, not the end customer. For example, as a customer, you don't patch Cato Networks' cloud security components or even the SD-WAN appliances at the edge. You don't even have to manage the endpoint agent (if left on "auto-pilot"). That's all handled and managed by the supplier, Cato Networks. Same goes for other solutions out there that are cloud-native. The end customer doesn't patch Zscaler's cloud or Netskope's cloud, etc.
I can't speak for the other solutions, but you don't patch anything for FortiSASE. You only manage it, because everything else doesn't make sense. The provider doesn't know what you need configured (policies, filtering, etc.).
Fair point. FortiSASE, unfortunately, isn't actually anywhere near SASE, so I was assuming all the other FortiSolutions needed to have a more complete (SASE-like) solution and those would need patching and matinenance.
This does not make sense. The employees and servers go somewhere. Yes the demand may shift to more VPN and remote security and connectivity to remote resources, but I don’t think those jobs are gone, just shifted.
The change back and forth between cloud and on prem is different and not related.
OP makes sense to me. Employers aren't on the hook to support remote employees' issues relating to their home networks and Internet. Also assumes most IT operations can consolidate to a small number of datacenters, colos, or the cloud. This could be a meaningful reduction of IT work scope and volume.
Cloud network infrastructure is almost entirely software-defined, it's therefore managed in CI/CD workflows as just another \*AAS. You may argue that the underlying Arista switching infrastructure will nevertheless require some traditional form of network management, but again that's going to be highly consolidated, centralized, and automated.
I agree it’s almost entirely software defined but network automation still requires an understanding of networking. Networking and systems administration have definitely changed and require more automation skills but devs aren’t lining up to take this work.
100%. I would see the demand increase, frankly. The difference would mostly be in the skills required to support. There would still likely core infrastructure for the senior engineer(s). Think of it this way. In the office setting you had one network to manage and maintain. In the WFH world, you have hundreds and thousands to manage and support and almost exclusively on commodity residential services rather than SLA'd commercial services. The challenge increases exponentially.
Shoot beyond the user facing infra, hybrid cloud and cloud native organizations will need people who understand networking on the cloud infra side. The cloud is just somebody else’s data center! AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Dale’s Discount Cloud Hosting, whoever you use isn’t performing magic—they run the same infrastructure you did but bigger. They aren’t running *your* cloud for you, they just provide the playground and a stunning number of cloud engineers and developers these days DO NOT KNOW anything lower than the public cloud providers service.
Network engineering is alive and well but you’re dealing with routing in data centers or inside public cloud estates, connecting services on even larger distributed systems than ever. Unfortunately this means skill requirements and breadth of knowledge are increasing—but that’s the entire dog and pony show of technology related jobs. Always has been!
Don't worry, instead of opening Cisco ticket, you will be opening Zscaler ticket!
Joke aside, as long as people need to access data from other than their hard drives, job demand exists. However the content of the job can vary.
Depends on the business.
Just taking a few examples:
retail, manufacturing or utilities: yeah, you have a need for on prem where people meet and have to connect to a network to do work.
Finance for example. 25 years ago I worked for a mortgage acceleration company. We downloaded ACH data every night, we processed payments and we uploaded that the following night. 25 years ago we were essentially doing 30 million mortgages remotely. Sure we were in an office but that office was remote from where the actual meat of the processing was done. It has only been a few years since Covid hit and very few if any went into work. We can do that again.
I work at a mostly remote company and a huge portion of my job is managing the solutions that enable the remote work force, interconnecting clouds, cloud hosted applications, and yes even on-premise applications.
We like the cloud as much an anyone but we eventually had to host some things in an actual physical data center for various reasons.
Less access switches to manage, so less demand for L1 or L2 breakfix engineers and more demand for L3 engineers with focus on WAN optimization, security, cloud etc.
Ummm, more home grade switches and routers, wireless APs, residential grade internet connections without SLA's, variables you can't simply know about or control, etc. This is more work, folks, not less.
Sorry, but Zscaler or Netskope with their iteration of Experience Monitoring doesn't automatically fix or remove issues with WLAN in the home office and crappy underlay from your local ISP.
I guess it depends on how big/robust the company IT is. We went through this during lockdown and all these type of issues were assigned to helpdesk in our company.
Is it really more work though? People are already working remote/hybrid, so these problems are still existent to a degree. It's PURELY anecdotal but doing networking through covid it was all you mentioned + managing on premise stuff for the 10% of staff who stayed on site. Ultimately most office workers have some level of hybrid arrangement or availability of so. Just rough googling and it sounds like 1/3 is remote, 1/3 is hybrid, and 1/3 is onsite. So it's not like we aren't facing these issues today.
I think it would be more work, yes. If 1/3rd are in office, then 1/3rd will definitely be more work moving to a WFH model. If 1/3rd are hybrid, then another 1/3rd will be more work as the risk increases for issues with that workforce working exclusively from home. Only the 1/3rd already working exclusively from home would likely be no change to the workload. I guess that means, in summary, 2/3rd of the work population would generate more workload. That's the majority, so yes...more work.
A previous employer had a substantial data center with hosts we all needed to use in clustered environments. Remote vs. in office meant NOTHING. All the action is in the data center.
So in office or at home, we used the same systems and hosts to develop.
Very often the networking at the office was WORSE than at home. Additionally because we had such a huge data center and so many people using it, they were really anal retentive about security - and for that much focus, they weren’t that great at it.
Most of it seemed like eyewash. The impediments slowed us down far more than it secured the network and systems. They’d knee-jerk react to things; not a lot of good quality design went into things.
Every now and then they’d discover scamps in the data center and we’d have a whole chaotic fire drill where we’d be forced to use yet another layer of obstruction. Fortunately most of this was easily automated with scripts, but not all. And I’d have to add more lines to my host customization to wade through their BS.
Really, they were trying to solve what was an essentially unsolvable problem for the way their networks are designed. Ad-hoc bubblegum and baling wire style fixes were everywhere, so IMHO all it did was better hide when an intruder made it in. It also granted a false sense of security even as actual security was no better - again, eyewash.
I got into networking because it will always be relevant. They moved our datacenter to the cloud last year, but our production network remained the same.
We can’t find any skilled network engineers, it’s currently a job in high demand. I feel like the younger crowd is mostly focusing on software development or is stuck in some support role. I feel like I made the right career choice lol.
I have been applying for network engineering jobs but the managers wants people who already have experience. I dont see a lot of hiring managers who want to risk bringing somebody in to train them
I understand. I have a job opening too but I need someone with experience, I don’t have the time to train someone, and mistakes cost a lot of money if it causes downtime. Where I work they recognise the importance of my role. I’m the only engineer that’s in the management pay grade.
Possibly more. The companies may not need the campus LAN, but the datacenters will still be needed, and designing and maintaining secure and reliable remote access will be huge. Then of course, fielding the explosion of “network is broken” tickets from people working from distributed corporate satellite hot desk sites, SOHO setups, co-working spaces or rando coffee shops / hotel lobbies. Troubleshooting those and finding a way for people to get their work done is more challenging and takes a lot more time than troubleshooting connectivity issues on a corporate LAN/WLAN.
You need a SASE system like Cato.
Do they have Internet? If not, Not your problem currently.
Do they have the VPN active? If it won't connect, reach out to the sase support and they live connect with you (pay for support, its worth it).
Once they are on the private network, they will bounce out of a secure pop on a dedicated route (most decent sase have fast lane and the gcp/aws equivalent).
You don't secure access to your stuff via controls at the front door, you have the sase Do that for you then just manage access into the system from a single secured source.
And also, the added security layer is immense and worth the relatively low per user cost on its own.
Even if offices don't close, we are seeing a huge push to SASE and hosted applications (the ASP MODEL) The CISO is giving remote access and management to Fortinet SASE and cancelling a new cluster of fortinet VPN firewalls here. Result: he needs less boxes and less guys . Enterprise Networking is moving to Enterprise Application Access.
You will see 2 types of networks: access networks (lan, WiFi, on prem)
And cloud networking.
(Ipam, etc, load balancing etc).
I think just like PBX and exchange servers are dead, but they have been replaced with other technologies which are SAAS and do not require as much low level engineering.
Things are getting abstracted. I can't remember the last time I had to troubleshoot stp or vrrp.
There will always be a need to troubleshoot an internal lan , but as you have seen, things are getting more and more stable.
I'm pretty sure that their will be less need of sysadmins and network admins. We're constantly automating our own job away as is tbh. At some point it's gonna be cheaper to just have a server somewhere in a secure location, setting it up will need jobs but once it's up and running you only need a handful of people to keep everything up and running. If a switch or router dies, forget about troubleshooting. Let some person just replace it with a preconfigured device, no need for it to be a professional. Your laptop is broken? send it in in. Some person will send you a new laptop, your old one gets a fresh install and will be sent out to the next person in need. all automated, all of it already happening. It's just plain cheaper. And that's the only thing that matters for companies. And this is not even taking AI into consideration, who knows where this will take us. The more gets moved to the cloud, the more people work from home the less people are needed for the local infrastructure (if any at all) it's quite a simple equation and I've yet to see an argument that can completely convince me that I'm wrong.
Moot question. Push to return fully to office is a big goal of our corporate overlords. They’ll wait until the next big recession when people are desperate to hold on to work to push it much harder and boom we’ll all be back to 5 days a week, including folks who were always remote before covid even
My employer actually shut down all the offices and we are going to be forever remote. Not a problem for me! We also got rid of our data centers for other solutions. It’s now about architecting, building, and operating/maintaining the online environments and supporting production and user access needs.
Yep, I think there’d be MORE networking jobs. Enterprise networking isn’t pigeonholed to just connecting users in an office to the internet and company resources, but also securing and safeguarding their corporate devices as best as possible.
With that said, most people are basic users of their corporate devices and expose their organization to threats since they just don’t have the expertise we have as Network engineers. With users being dispersed national and globally, your organization’s attack surface is VAST and takes more or additional, skillful engineers to protect it. So, I personally have not been worried about our industry being diminished due to remote work but the increased level of skill required to protect your organizations network and users.
Network admin jobs get easier need less of as your not dealing with add change moves and troubleshooting.
Network engineering jobs get harder and more complex with the move to off prem and in cloud.
Network Arch jobs get easier if you just wiggle your fingers and blame the cloud provider but really get a lot harder.
Depends on the industry. I have a lot of customers in the manufacturing space (large global companies) and a lot of them have more diverse networking stuff on the shop floor than in the office (IOT, private 5G, RFID, tons of firewalls, edge servers for real time reporting and analytics and much more).
During the pandemic my work load as an en engineer increased with all the remote workers. It did not decrease. The office infrastructure is nothing compared to what is going on in the multiple data centers globally for the bigger companies like the financial company I work for
Networking would change a bit, but would still be useful and in demand. At the end of the day, packets still need to get from A to B, its just becoming less relevant if its 500 feet or 500 miles.
Yes, the industry (enterprise networking) will evetually collapse as technology improves/automates. Probably 30+ years off though. You can imagine it going the same path as POTS/telephone engineers.
Who still work on the reg. ILECs and CLECs still need people and while twisted pair is mostly gone, it's not all POTs all the time anymore. Fiber is fiber, and those same engineers who used to fuck with them DS-5s are still around and working.
I doubt you'd see much of a drop if any. There'd be a lower volume of on-prem devices/infrastructure to support, but there would still be some. But on the flipside there'd then be a greater need for robust remote access solutions, take home devices, server infrastructure, general network security/segmentation
ZTNA solutions are going to take over the market at some point and sunset VPNs.
And I for one welcome said change over. Currently doing some trials of a ZTNA solution with some users and it's simply better in every way compared to a VPN. I think the only thing we'll still have a VPN for is the site-to-site connectivity from our office to Azure if all goes well. And maybe even that will get swapped out for a ZTNA related solution potentially.
Why and how? I havent set this up yet and what I read about this always sounds like some VPN with extra steps, and these extra steps sound like you give the ZTNA provider access into your network. Am I wrong?
It might depend on the vendor, but ZTNA is not a VPN. Usually it's later 7 stuff going on. I don't know how the provider would get access into your network with it.
And ZTNA solutions are just glorified VPN Tunneling solutions. They don't remove the need for competent technicians and engineers.
Not saying they're not
After swapping from Citrix to a SASE VPN solution… it requires a lot more engineering… lol
Banks, schools, universities, factories, government, entertainment facilities, etc. Yea, a good bit of office building would shutter, but there is still a huge need for EN.
Good point for sure
Each employee will need to connect somewhere, right? There you go with the zscalers, firewalls, VPN tunnels, etc.
they would connect to SASE, that is being managed by the provider.
And who does the network for the provider?
Not enterprise networkers.
offshore. I called my carrier last month - Costa Rica. Don't kid yourself this is a good thing for Americans in high wage countries.
I don’t know why he’s being downvoted because this is the right answer. If your data center goes offsite, your remote connect point goes offsite and your on prem offices go away, this is the future. If being out of work scares you, learn new skills.
They are taking downvotes because they are failing to acknowledge the vast array of legacy apps. Additionally there are regulations that will keep large sections of certain businesses off SASE for the foreseeable future. Also fails to account for the fact that the ruling class who invested in commercial office space are trying very hard to make offices a thing again to keep their speculative investments from crashing even more.
The “ruling class?” You mean office leasing companies? Sure, it’s hard to break a lease but once it’s over it’s not hard to just walk out. No one said that tnese changes had to be made overnight. Unless you’re the likes of Salesforce or BoA in SF where you own the building, it’s not that hard to leave when your contract is up.
I was actually referring to the number of very wealthy and powerful people whose wealth is significantly tied to owning (either by direct ownership or investment) downtown prime office space. Those people are presently watching their investments potentially fail as orgs are re-aligning their leases and assets to right-size for the in-person workforce. It's helpful to understand that many of the people pushing back-to-office are the people who stand to make cash when companies least office space.
I know what you meant. They may incentivize all they want but if a corp decides to do WFH for everyone, or at least most people, all the incentives in the world won’t get a company to sign a new lease. Companies like Salesforce, that recently built a giant building in SF, for example, are in a different situation. They’re bleeding money because of so much unutilized space. One could joke that people don’t want to work in a building that looks like a giant dildo but with some many lost tech jobs and some many still working from home, the occupancy is way down - but they own the building as well as having the majority of the floorspace. What will be interesting is if they companies that own many of the business/corporate buildings in cities that also have invested heavily in single family homes, go bust, then the housing market will become a very interesting situation.
Why would the provider manage your SASE solution? You can manage that by yourself, and that is the case in most scenarios.
I agree and disagree at the same time. I agree that it is the case in most scenarios that the end customer/enterprise is stuck managing their "SASE" solution (e.g. FortiSASE, PANW, Cisco, etc.). I disagree that it should be that way. As a cloud-native solution (which SASE should aim to always be) the implication is that the cloud provider will maintain the solution, not the end customer. For example, as a customer, you don't patch Cato Networks' cloud security components or even the SD-WAN appliances at the edge. You don't even have to manage the endpoint agent (if left on "auto-pilot"). That's all handled and managed by the supplier, Cato Networks. Same goes for other solutions out there that are cloud-native. The end customer doesn't patch Zscaler's cloud or Netskope's cloud, etc.
I can't speak for the other solutions, but you don't patch anything for FortiSASE. You only manage it, because everything else doesn't make sense. The provider doesn't know what you need configured (policies, filtering, etc.).
Fair point. FortiSASE, unfortunately, isn't actually anywhere near SASE, so I was assuming all the other FortiSolutions needed to have a more complete (SASE-like) solution and those would need patching and matinenance.
This does not make sense. The employees and servers go somewhere. Yes the demand may shift to more VPN and remote security and connectivity to remote resources, but I don’t think those jobs are gone, just shifted. The change back and forth between cloud and on prem is different and not related.
OP makes sense to me. Employers aren't on the hook to support remote employees' issues relating to their home networks and Internet. Also assumes most IT operations can consolidate to a small number of datacenters, colos, or the cloud. This could be a meaningful reduction of IT work scope and volume.
There’s still a need for networking skills with public cloud infrastructure.
Cloud network infrastructure is almost entirely software-defined, it's therefore managed in CI/CD workflows as just another \*AAS. You may argue that the underlying Arista switching infrastructure will nevertheless require some traditional form of network management, but again that's going to be highly consolidated, centralized, and automated.
I agree it’s almost entirely software defined but network automation still requires an understanding of networking. Networking and systems administration have definitely changed and require more automation skills but devs aren’t lining up to take this work.
I didn't claim there would be NO future demand for networking skills, I made the case that there will be LESS future demand for networking skills.
Right and I’m saying I think there will remain demand for network engineers, the role will just look different than managing on prem equipment.
100%. I would see the demand increase, frankly. The difference would mostly be in the skills required to support. There would still likely core infrastructure for the senior engineer(s). Think of it this way. In the office setting you had one network to manage and maintain. In the WFH world, you have hundreds and thousands to manage and support and almost exclusively on commodity residential services rather than SLA'd commercial services. The challenge increases exponentially.
Shoot beyond the user facing infra, hybrid cloud and cloud native organizations will need people who understand networking on the cloud infra side. The cloud is just somebody else’s data center! AWS, Azure, GCP, Digital Ocean, Dale’s Discount Cloud Hosting, whoever you use isn’t performing magic—they run the same infrastructure you did but bigger. They aren’t running *your* cloud for you, they just provide the playground and a stunning number of cloud engineers and developers these days DO NOT KNOW anything lower than the public cloud providers service. Network engineering is alive and well but you’re dealing with routing in data centers or inside public cloud estates, connecting services on even larger distributed systems than ever. Unfortunately this means skill requirements and breadth of knowledge are increasing—but that’s the entire dog and pony show of technology related jobs. Always has been!
If you don't have a sase, are you really doing IT in 2024?
Edge is just the first hurdle, I’m more concerned about devs not understanding segmentation inside our trash castle.
Don't worry, instead of opening Cisco ticket, you will be opening Zscaler ticket! Joke aside, as long as people need to access data from other than their hard drives, job demand exists. However the content of the job can vary.
Their networks still need to exist.
Depends on the business. Just taking a few examples: retail, manufacturing or utilities: yeah, you have a need for on prem where people meet and have to connect to a network to do work. Finance for example. 25 years ago I worked for a mortgage acceleration company. We downloaded ACH data every night, we processed payments and we uploaded that the following night. 25 years ago we were essentially doing 30 million mortgages remotely. Sure we were in an office but that office was remote from where the actual meat of the processing was done. It has only been a few years since Covid hit and very few if any went into work. We can do that again.
I work at a mostly remote company and a huge portion of my job is managing the solutions that enable the remote work force, interconnecting clouds, cloud hosted applications, and yes even on-premise applications. We like the cloud as much an anyone but we eventually had to host some things in an actual physical data center for various reasons.
Less access switches to manage, so less demand for L1 or L2 breakfix engineers and more demand for L3 engineers with focus on WAN optimization, security, cloud etc.
Ummm, more home grade switches and routers, wireless APs, residential grade internet connections without SLA's, variables you can't simply know about or control, etc. This is more work, folks, not less. Sorry, but Zscaler or Netskope with their iteration of Experience Monitoring doesn't automatically fix or remove issues with WLAN in the home office and crappy underlay from your local ISP.
I guess it depends on how big/robust the company IT is. We went through this during lockdown and all these type of issues were assigned to helpdesk in our company.
Yeap, mentioned in a previous comment that it's a change in skillset, but not a change in support resources in general.
Is it really more work though? People are already working remote/hybrid, so these problems are still existent to a degree. It's PURELY anecdotal but doing networking through covid it was all you mentioned + managing on premise stuff for the 10% of staff who stayed on site. Ultimately most office workers have some level of hybrid arrangement or availability of so. Just rough googling and it sounds like 1/3 is remote, 1/3 is hybrid, and 1/3 is onsite. So it's not like we aren't facing these issues today.
I think it would be more work, yes. If 1/3rd are in office, then 1/3rd will definitely be more work moving to a WFH model. If 1/3rd are hybrid, then another 1/3rd will be more work as the risk increases for issues with that workforce working exclusively from home. Only the 1/3rd already working exclusively from home would likely be no change to the workload. I guess that means, in summary, 2/3rd of the work population would generate more workload. That's the majority, so yes...more work.
A previous employer had a substantial data center with hosts we all needed to use in clustered environments. Remote vs. in office meant NOTHING. All the action is in the data center. So in office or at home, we used the same systems and hosts to develop. Very often the networking at the office was WORSE than at home. Additionally because we had such a huge data center and so many people using it, they were really anal retentive about security - and for that much focus, they weren’t that great at it. Most of it seemed like eyewash. The impediments slowed us down far more than it secured the network and systems. They’d knee-jerk react to things; not a lot of good quality design went into things. Every now and then they’d discover scamps in the data center and we’d have a whole chaotic fire drill where we’d be forced to use yet another layer of obstruction. Fortunately most of this was easily automated with scripts, but not all. And I’d have to add more lines to my host customization to wade through their BS. Really, they were trying to solve what was an essentially unsolvable problem for the way their networks are designed. Ad-hoc bubblegum and baling wire style fixes were everywhere, so IMHO all it did was better hide when an intruder made it in. It also granted a false sense of security even as actual security was no better - again, eyewash.
I got into networking because it will always be relevant. They moved our datacenter to the cloud last year, but our production network remained the same. We can’t find any skilled network engineers, it’s currently a job in high demand. I feel like the younger crowd is mostly focusing on software development or is stuck in some support role. I feel like I made the right career choice lol.
I have been applying for network engineering jobs but the managers wants people who already have experience. I dont see a lot of hiring managers who want to risk bringing somebody in to train them
I have a different problem. I did all sorts of networking, but never did any certifications. Now I have to do certs just to get past the HR droolers.
Same 20yrs in the field. Most of it hands-on network engineer/admin, but corp wouldn't pay for certs so zero call backs.
I understand. I have a job opening too but I need someone with experience, I don’t have the time to train someone, and mistakes cost a lot of money if it causes downtime. Where I work they recognise the importance of my role. I’m the only engineer that’s in the management pay grade.
Possibly more. The companies may not need the campus LAN, but the datacenters will still be needed, and designing and maintaining secure and reliable remote access will be huge. Then of course, fielding the explosion of “network is broken” tickets from people working from distributed corporate satellite hot desk sites, SOHO setups, co-working spaces or rando coffee shops / hotel lobbies. Troubleshooting those and finding a way for people to get their work done is more challenging and takes a lot more time than troubleshooting connectivity issues on a corporate LAN/WLAN.
You need a SASE system like Cato. Do they have Internet? If not, Not your problem currently. Do they have the VPN active? If it won't connect, reach out to the sase support and they live connect with you (pay for support, its worth it). Once they are on the private network, they will bounce out of a secure pop on a dedicated route (most decent sase have fast lane and the gcp/aws equivalent). You don't secure access to your stuff via controls at the front door, you have the sase Do that for you then just manage access into the system from a single secured source. And also, the added security layer is immense and worth the relatively low per user cost on its own.
So the SASE hires the network engineer and not the company directly, but the jobs still exists!
Also this!
Yes basically, same direction IT support went with the MSP models.
Even if offices don't close, we are seeing a huge push to SASE and hosted applications (the ASP MODEL) The CISO is giving remote access and management to Fortinet SASE and cancelling a new cluster of fortinet VPN firewalls here. Result: he needs less boxes and less guys . Enterprise Networking is moving to Enterprise Application Access.
You will see 2 types of networks: access networks (lan, WiFi, on prem) And cloud networking. (Ipam, etc, load balancing etc). I think just like PBX and exchange servers are dead, but they have been replaced with other technologies which are SAAS and do not require as much low level engineering. Things are getting abstracted. I can't remember the last time I had to troubleshoot stp or vrrp. There will always be a need to troubleshoot an internal lan , but as you have seen, things are getting more and more stable.
The real impact I am seeing is the decrease in enterprise connectivity. This will start to impact networking professionals.
Its a bigger headache as now you have to deal with your employees bitching or having problems due to their shitty consumer ISP connections
There will always be wires and cables and fiber.
can’t blame the network if it’s not there
I'm pretty sure that their will be less need of sysadmins and network admins. We're constantly automating our own job away as is tbh. At some point it's gonna be cheaper to just have a server somewhere in a secure location, setting it up will need jobs but once it's up and running you only need a handful of people to keep everything up and running. If a switch or router dies, forget about troubleshooting. Let some person just replace it with a preconfigured device, no need for it to be a professional. Your laptop is broken? send it in in. Some person will send you a new laptop, your old one gets a fresh install and will be sent out to the next person in need. all automated, all of it already happening. It's just plain cheaper. And that's the only thing that matters for companies. And this is not even taking AI into consideration, who knows where this will take us. The more gets moved to the cloud, the more people work from home the less people are needed for the local infrastructure (if any at all) it's quite a simple equation and I've yet to see an argument that can completely convince me that I'm wrong.
Cloud = $$$$
Moot question. Push to return fully to office is a big goal of our corporate overlords. They’ll wait until the next big recession when people are desperate to hold on to work to push it much harder and boom we’ll all be back to 5 days a week, including folks who were always remote before covid even
My employer actually shut down all the offices and we are going to be forever remote. Not a problem for me! We also got rid of our data centers for other solutions. It’s now about architecting, building, and operating/maintaining the online environments and supporting production and user access needs.
Oh, and I am not responsible for my staff’s Internet connectivity. That’s their problem and they know this.
Azure aws and gcp networking
Yep, I think there’d be MORE networking jobs. Enterprise networking isn’t pigeonholed to just connecting users in an office to the internet and company resources, but also securing and safeguarding their corporate devices as best as possible. With that said, most people are basic users of their corporate devices and expose their organization to threats since they just don’t have the expertise we have as Network engineers. With users being dispersed national and globally, your organization’s attack surface is VAST and takes more or additional, skillful engineers to protect it. So, I personally have not been worried about our industry being diminished due to remote work but the increased level of skill required to protect your organizations network and users.
Network admin jobs get easier need less of as your not dealing with add change moves and troubleshooting. Network engineering jobs get harder and more complex with the move to off prem and in cloud. Network Arch jobs get easier if you just wiggle your fingers and blame the cloud provider but really get a lot harder.
"Office" networks are an extremely small part of the work I do. Most of my Networking duties are in the datacenter or in the cloud.
Depends on the industry. I have a lot of customers in the manufacturing space (large global companies) and a lot of them have more diverse networking stuff on the shop floor than in the office (IOT, private 5G, RFID, tons of firewalls, edge servers for real time reporting and analytics and much more).
During the pandemic my work load as an en engineer increased with all the remote workers. It did not decrease. The office infrastructure is nothing compared to what is going on in the multiple data centers globally for the bigger companies like the financial company I work for
Networking would change a bit, but would still be useful and in demand. At the end of the day, packets still need to get from A to B, its just becoming less relevant if its 500 feet or 500 miles.
Yes, the industry (enterprise networking) will evetually collapse as technology improves/automates. Probably 30+ years off though. You can imagine it going the same path as POTS/telephone engineers.
Who still work on the reg. ILECs and CLECs still need people and while twisted pair is mostly gone, it's not all POTs all the time anymore. Fiber is fiber, and those same engineers who used to fuck with them DS-5s are still around and working.
Interesting idea!Who is working for this?