Network engineers: Obsolete or still relevant?

Agile, autonomous networks are set to dominate the corporate WAN in the coming years. As networks get increasingly virtualised, their abstraction away from the hardware layer will mean greater speed and agility in deployment, configuration, testing and management of the network.

Because of the explosion of data, big jumps in compute power, theoretically-infinite storage and the commoditisation of networking equipment, along with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), a new networking domain is taking shape. It is increasingly oriented towards autonomous networks, which can be automatically configured and in tandem with virtual machines that are spun off.

AI, ML and other automation tools are playing greater roles in the networks of today, where a chain of autonomous and intelligent sub-systems are being stitched together to make self-healing networks a reality.

This has implications on the role of the network engineers, whose workdays will shift away from error-prone manual processes to more comprehensive, more strategic routines.

In network security, for example, much of the visibility that had to be manually extracted in the past will be more easily available on dashboards and intelligent network automation tools. The engineer will be more focused on top-level administration and partnering security teams to ensure that protocols are adhered to. The network engineer will be the bridge between the line-of-business users and the technical systems, ensuring that the latter meet the goals of the CIO and the CTO.

Modern network visibility tools give deep and real-time insights into not only the network’s security posture but also its efficiency, reliability and load. This frees up the engineer to orchestrate automation tasks and ensure that routine tasks like provisioning of services or configuring routing protocols are being automated efficiently, without micromanaging them.

The job scope of the network engineer will change — he or she will spend less time in configuration and manual systems maintenance, and will be more focused on unifying the network with other aspects of IT infrastructure. Autonomous networks extend clouds to the network edge via software-defined networking, and network engineers will need to know about applications as well as the cloud, along with everything in between the edge and the cloud. Coding in high-level languages and familiarising themselves with modern storage and compute systems will be increasingly on the to-do list of the network engineer.

With the advent of 5G, Internet of Things (IoT), and AI and ML, networking still plays a prominent and indispensable role in the IT infrastructure stack — and the network engineer will continue to be the human agent primarily responsible for ensuring that the network serves the business. The network engineer’s role may get more complex, with a wider array of skill sets needed to push a network to its optimum efficiency, but it may get less complicated and tedious as creativity and intuition play a larger role.

In Asia, with many major enterprises yet to undergo digital transformation on a large scale and hundreds of millions of consumers entering the market, the most productive and rewarding years of the network engineering profession may very well lie in the future.

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