Working in IT requires a continuous process of learning new skills as technologies emerge or evolve. Yet, due to the wide variety of skills available, it’s important to spend time researching all the options to ensure that the skills you end up acquiring are both interesting and useful for your professional career.

Looking at hot IT infrastructure skills from 2022, I can see some trends forming. For one, the need for scripting, AI, and other automation processes is at an all-time high. From an infrastructure perspective, learning how to deploy and manage tools that intelligently ingest and analyze data is now a top priority.

It’s also no surprise that skills grounded in data security are in high demand. This includes expanding popular cloud and data center security frameworks, in addition to skills that help secure complex hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

Finally, a third skill pattern likely to be seen in 2022 will be the skills needed to deploy and manage new and emerging technologies such as private 5G and IoT.

Let’s take a closer look at the skills that I think are or will be important for IT infrastructure professionals:

1. Advanced cloud networking

Configuring advanced network settings in infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud can be dramatically different from one cloud platform to another. Popular cloud providers, including AWS and Microsoft Azure, use different terminology and processes when it comes to designing, deploying, and maintaining network services according to proprietary best practice guidelines.

In addition to learning basic network services for each cloud provider, advanced networking within the enterprise also includes the need to understand and deploy multi-cloud management platforms layered across multiple clouds. While multi-cloud management can indeed simplify control and visibility of hybrid/multi-cloud architectures, it is critical to understand how overlay software interacts with each cloud provider’s infrastructure at the network level, from a performance and data security perspective.

2.Ops AI

As enterprise IT architectures become increasingly complex with multiple layers of software to scrutinize and analyze, using artificial intelligence to sift through and make sense of all data is quickly becoming a necessity. On the infrastructure front, AI platforms for IT operations (AIOps) are a way to leverage AI to analyze network traffic for performance and/or security issues. data.

To properly deploy and manage an AIOps platform in a corporate network, it is best for administrators to have a solid foundation in the following areas:

Network/device health monitoring

Network performance and security data collection

Automation/scripting techniques

Interpretation of analyzed data into actionable correction steps

3. Zero Trust for Secure Workloads

Most IT infrastructure professionals understand zero trust to be a set of principles that require users and devices to be identified, authenticated, and authorized before accessing corporate resources. What is missing, however, is the ability to secure backend workloads for processes that communicate and transport sensitive data between servers, data centers, and clouds.

Zero Trust Workloads will be the next iteration of the Zero Trust framework and the skills required to secure, monitor, and troubleshoot workload communications.

4. Containers

Containers have become very popular in the DevOps world for several reasons. On the one hand, they are light, requiring little CPU and memory resources. It’s also easy to move containers between a wide range of data center and cloud environments. Finally, the speed at which containers can be deployed is far superior to other deployment options.

However, the ability to build and publish is only half the battle. For IT shops that are in the early stages of adopting containers in the DevOps lifecycle, additional skills are required. These include modifying existing DevOps workflows to include container processes, streamlining container deployments using custom scripting/automation, and the skills required to manage containers using orchestration tools.

5. Performance management

Additionally, on the DevOps side of the IT house, application administrators who have a deep understanding of application performance management (APM) software will be in high demand. Since DevOps philosophies call for continuous application improvement on a consistent basis and within a Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) framework, manually monitoring application performance and identifying ways to increase speeds and reduce latency are no longer effective. Instead, using APM tools that automatically monitor/assess applications, identify defects, and provide remediation steps is now a “must-have” instead of a “nice-to-have.”

6. Smart Building IoT for Health and Safety

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the priorities of many technology projects. An example of technology that has gained interest lately is using the IoT to monitor the operational technology (OT) of physical buildings and campuses and to run automated environmental controls. This includes intelligent monitoring and adjustment of heating and cooling systems, real-time asset tracking, air quality sensor checks, smart lighting and occupancy metering.

With many commercial properties remaining at low occupancy levels due to large numbers of employees working from home, now is an ideal time to deploy and thoroughly test automated smart building systems with relatively little overhead. impact and interference on employees. The technical skills required for these types of smart building services include operating various IoT platforms, deploying and managing monitoring/alert systems, and extracting and analyzing data using built-in APIs.

7. Private 5G

While private 5G deployed within the enterprise has garnered enterprise interest for several years, little traction has been made from a production deployment standpoint. However, from 2022 and beyond, expect companies to start deploying private 5G networks in their facilities to address the real performance and security issues that Wi-Fi succumbs to. Skills within Private 5G include not only deploying and managing a Cellular Radio Access Network (RAN) – but also the ability to integrate 5G network and network slicing functions into the infrastructure an organization’s existing LAN/WAN via Quality of Service (QoS) translations.

What to read next:

A word of warning for remote IT infrastructure teams

Why We Need Infrastructure-Driven Innovation to Transform Network Security

Responding to Broadband Questions in the Infrastructure Investment Bill