By Chandra Hosek
At one time or other, network engineers have channeled Rodney Dangerfield, and exclaimed, “I don’t get no respect.” It seems like the network is blamed first for most every IT issue.
Does the perception of the network as just a set of dumb pipes – the plumbing of the IT world, as it were – make network engineers in people’s minds just “the plumbers?”
Now, plumbing is an honorable profession (and when you need one, you really need one), but the comparison does network professionals a disservice. It may have been apt when a network professional’s main focus in life was keeping all the network devices up and running, but that’s no longer the case. And it perpetuates the fallacy that the network is just a utility: You turn it on like water or electricity and it always works the same barring a major problem.
It doesn’t work like that. Today’s networks are dynamic, complex entities that are ever-changing. Managing them is made more challenging by a push-pull effect of end users and branch offices spread further out in far flung locations while resources are being consolidated in a few data centers and other central sites. Other trends such as virtualization, WAN optimization, cloud computing, and others make network management anything but trivial.
As a result, the network professional today is responsible for much more than “the pipes and fixtures.” Ensuring the delivery of critical applications over the wide area network has become the responsibility of the network engineer, and it is performance, not piping, that is the major concern.
With that in mind, we posit a new, more accurate alter ego for the network engineer: The doctor. A cross between a primary care physician responsible for preventative care and a cardiologist responsible for ensuring the circulatory system is performing adequately.
The network is the lifeline of the business, requiring skilled engineers to constantly monitor and manage the performance of the applications traversing the major arteries.
Especially in today’s economy, it’s in the network engineer’s best interest to show that he or she has moved beyond just watching red and green lights looking for device problems that now only happen less than 1 percent of the time. (A doctor doesn’t hang around the on-call room only getting off his butt when someone flatlines.) Heck, you can outsource that function quicker than you can say “plumber’s crack.” It’s time network engineers get more respect for the work they do. The health of most businesses depends on realizing how critical the network is and focusing on performance, not just availability.
Help us out: What more could NetQoS be doing to educate people? What should network engineers be doing to educate their management and others? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Chandra Hosek is Senior Public/Press Relations Manager at NetQoS.
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