Network performance is just as difficult – and just as important – as network security, but security is “sexier.” It brings to mind ideas of James Bond’s villain Boris yelling, “I am inwincible!” But, if you’ve got an IT staff that knows a lot about security but nothing about latency, you can guess how well the apps will perform.
But even separating network performance from network security isn’t enough – because the network fills so many different roles in the company, network engineers are becoming specialized by necessity.
According to IT Career Planet, Cisco just announced three new Cisco Certified Network Asscociate concentrations – CCNA Security, CCNA Voice (for VoIP issues), and CCNA Wireless – with an eye towards closing the “skills gap” and providing specialized knowledge. (Let’s side-step the whole “vendors offering training and certification” issue – that’s the way the system’s set up, and so far no one’s come along with a better solution to replace it.) Anyway, more specialized training is good news.
The bad news is that while Robert Whitely at Forrester Research says that in five years, organizations that have a dedicated position for wireless, voice, and security will grow as high as 70%, we can’t help but notice that he didn’t ask the question of whether there will be dedicated positions for network performance. Yes, it’s great that there’s going to be a VoIP specialization – but VoIP is only one of the applications that IT is delivering.
It’s one of the reasons that we’ve been offering (vendor-neutral) network training and certification in network performance technologies, metrics, and analysis, in our NetAnalyst program.
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