Network Engineering Service Type Overview

The network engineering services market was valued at USD 30.91 Billion in the year 2016 and is considered to be projected to reach USD 54.69 Billion by 2022 growing at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of about 9.8% during the forecast period. The forecast period has been considered from 2017 to 2022, whereas 2016 is considered as the base year for the estimation of the market study.

The network engineering services market vendors are Accenture (Ireland), Ericsson (Sweden), IBM (US), Huawei (China), Juniper Networks (US), Dell (US), Cisco (US), Fujitsu (Japan), Aviat Networks (US), Tech Mahindra (India), and Mphasis (India).

Key Target Audience for Network Engineering Services Market

•        Network Engineering Services providers
•        Professional service providers
•        Managed Service Providers (MSPs)
•        System integrators
•        Resellers and distributors
•        Investors and venture capitalists

This jobs would be also required some good IT Certifications, like CCIE, AWS, RedHat, etc, to enhance your chances of gaining more advance roles in Network Engineering. But gaining these certifications isn’t considered a piece of cake and you would have to go through lots of training. I would recommend you to check out the courses offered at the SPOTO Club if you are interested in the above certifications.

Network Cutover Overview

A network cutover is often considered to be the culminating event for networking projects. All of the planning, staging, testing, as well as configuration,  leads to this brief yet critical change window. Though there would be a variety of cutover types and activities, I’ve found that there are some fundamental principles that apply to all of them.

Discovery

For a cutover to be successful, you need to start with network discovery. The level and depth of discovery would be depended on how well you already know the network, what sort of cutover it is, and how well you understand the technology.

Remember that your level of discovery is commensurate with the complexity of the cutover. During the discovery phase, it’s important to collect as much information as you can so you’re not scrounging for it at the last minute, or worse, during the cutover. Collect information like VLANs, usernames and passwords, SNMP strings, where ACLs are located, routing configuration, IP address of important resources like DHCP servers, DNS servers, and so on.

Planning and Testing

Once you have the info you need and have studied the topology, it’s time to plan what you’re going to actually do. For some cutovers, this is unnecessary or just impossible. For example, I don’t have Cisco Firepower appliances in a lab at work or at home, so it’s just not possible for me to the lab a Firepower install.

However, there are times when I’m making significant changes to routing in which case I’d create the customer’s topology as accurately as I can in GNS3. That way, I would be able to test changes in a lab environment.

Staging

I also have tried to stage devices and/or configuration. This is actually pretty easy to do most of the time even with complex cutovers, and it would be having a couple of benefits. Staging devices and configuration would mean that there’s less to do during the change window, and it would also mean that network downtime can be much shorter. An example using the scenario above would be spinning up the new core switches in an adjoining rack to the prod switches. Then, I would carefully trunk the old switches to the new switches by making the allocation of plenty of bandwidth. Now I would be able to slowly perform the migration of all the distribution switches, VM hosts, etc over to the new switches carefully over several days or even weeks.

Now, you have gone through the Network Service and Cutover Overview. I would like to recommend that if you wish to have more knowledge, you should join the prep courses which are offered at the SPOTO Club.