Discover the Skills of an Infrastructure Support Specialist
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe an infrastructure support specialist career path.
- List key skills relevant to the role of an infrastructure support specialist.
An Infrastructure Support Career
Let’s explore whether you’d be a good fit for the role of an infrastructure support specialist by starting with some questions.
Who are you?
Do you like to think methodically about applying broad principles to specific use cases? Do you enjoy solving problems and thinking about how to optimize system performance? Are you interested in minimizing the threat of bad actors to your organization’s network, systems, and data? Do you enjoy digging into the details of how things work? If so, then infrastructure support might be the career for you.
What do you like to do?
Let’s dive deeper into what you, as an infrastructure support specialist, spend your time doing. As an infrastructure support specialist, you’re skilled in fine-tuning the infrastructure that allows businesses to operate efficiently and securely. You have a desire to constantly improve the security posture of the organization you support. You apply troubleshooting and diagnostic skills to understand anomalies in your organization’s infrastructure, and work through resolution.
What type of team do you want to work with?
Infrastructure support specialists are part of a team whose focus is customer service, providing day-to-day support to employees and clients. You could be working in any environment that relies on system and network architecture to perform some aspect of a business; for example, in a technology organization or in the finance, manufacturing, or healthcare industry. You may provide support both in person and remotely, usually in a non-supervisory position. Relationship-building and teamwork are important skills for you to have. You will work with various teams across the organization, for example with incident response.
What is the career trajectory for this role?
As an infrastructure support specialist, you generally start your career as a technical support specialist, computer technician, or system/network administrator to build out your skills and knowledge. As you gain more experience and develop your skills through professional development courses and relevant industry certifications, you can progress toward a role of an information technology (IT) director.
Why should you consider this career?
There’s a high demand for infrastructure support specialists, and career prospects are excellent. What’s more, you get to help with the usability, management, and security of organizational information and data. You have a crucial responsibility to ensure that the goals of your client or your organization are met, in relation to network systems, data storage facilities, hardware, and software.
Infrastructure Support Specialist Skills
After hearing more about this career, are you getting excited about helping organizations secure their systems and technologies? Let’s turn our focus to the education and skills that are valuable in this profession.
Education
A bachelor’s degree in computer science, cybersecurity, IT, information systems, computer engineering, or a related field is usually good to have but not necessarily required.
Experience
Typically, employers look for candidates with anywhere from 3 to 8 years of experience in IT customer support, system administration, or management of physical and logical security systems. Skills in systems security or administration, troubleshooting, cloud support, and operating systems are also useful.
In addition to formal education, it is recommended that you obtain software development and engineering knowledge as well. This includes knowledge of various software languages such as Python, Ruby, and Go. Learning these languages allows you to build out system architectures through automation templates (Infrastructure as Code - IaC). Using IaC, you write a program and test the infrastructure functionality in code before deploying the network, virtual machines, and more. Once the tests are clean or acceptable, you deploy the code into production to build out the environment.
Certifications
Pursuing a certification is a great idea for this field. Certifications that address system security, network infrastructure, access control, cryptography, assessments and audits, organizational security, and more allow you to skill up and get your foot in the door. Here are some common certifications for infrastructure support specialists.
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Certification
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Description
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Systems Security Certified Practitioner (SSCP)
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This credential demonstrates you have the advanced technical skills and knowledge to implement, monitor, and administer IT infrastructure using security best practices, policies, and procedures established by the cybersecurity experts. |
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This program demonstrates baseline security skills for IT support professionals. |
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This certification helps you develop a career in IT infrastructure, covering troubleshooting, configuring, and managing networks. |
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Certified Network Computer Technician
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This computer technician program helps you demonstrate the ability to function, structure, operate, file manage, install, configure/upgrade, manage memory, and diagnose and troubleshoot operating systems and hardware (including motherboards, processors, and printers). |
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Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge (CCSK)
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A cohesive and vendor-neutral understanding of how to secure data in the cloud. The CCSK credential is the foundation to prepare you to earn additional cloud credentials. |
Knowledge
Working as an infrastructure support specialist involves applying cybersecurity and privacy principles to organizational requirements. It’s key to have a solid understanding of computer networking concepts and protocols, network security methodologies, risk management, cybersecurity and privacy laws, and threats and vulnerabilities.
You should be comfortable identifying specific operational impacts of cybersecurity lapses, backing up and recovering data, and implementing access control mechanisms for hosts and networks. It’s also useful to have familiarity with incident response and handling methodologies, network traffic analysis methods, and how traffic flows across the network.
Business Skills
A huge part of success as an infrastructure support specialist involves customer service and communication. The ability to analyze, organize, and communicate information is paramount during the infrastructure support process. You should also enjoy strategizing and working with others.
Sum It Up
In this module, you’ve learned more about the importance of infrastructure support in providing reliable security, connectivity, and support and accessibility for employees and clients. You’ve also discovered the skills and responsibilities that go along with this role.
In the next module, Responsibilities of an Infrastructure Support Specialist, you learn how to identify, protect, and monitor critical infrastructure, as well as how to respond to infrastructure incidents. Interested in learning more about cybersecurity roles and hearing from security professionals? Check out the Cybersecurity Learning Hub on Trailhead.
Resources
- External Site: SANS: 20 Coolest Careers in Cybersecurity
- External Site: National Initiative for Cybersecurity Careers and Studies (NICCS): Infrastructure Support