Is Cisco ISE worth learning?

[rick31]

Hi everyone!

I've been at a MSP for about 4 years now and I over see most of network infrastructure for clients. I came from a large enterprise that was a Cisco shop, since I was pretty new when I worked at this larger corporation I never got into the weeds of ISE. Now being in the industry for some years know I wanted to see if anyone had thoughts on learning Cisco's ISE platform.

I have a cluster of R620's in my lab and I decided to spin up a ISE VM and connect it to my GNS3 lab, so all the setup of ISE makes sense to me connecting to a AAA server, utilizing 802.1x. I just wanted to get some opinions on if its really worth it to learn this platform, currently none of my MSP's clients use this however long term I'm looking to do network administration for a hospital. It seems (from my view) that its more beneficial to learn ISE if you utilize it but its not worth learning like other core concepts like CCNA, AWS etc.

[balaji.bandi]

Identity is very important in the future network, so learning ISE for network engineer always a advantage, unlike old day network engineer to manage all. But ISE required now a days dedicated engineer to perform various task.

ISE required big resources and i would suggest to use VM for learning you get 90days full features license to test.

if i were you i take backup and re-install after License expery to get another 90days.

[Leo Laohoo]

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@rick31 wrote:
however long term I'm looking to do network administration for a hospital.

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Yes. 

More importantly, learn not just how to use and configure ISE but other vendor's authentication server, like ISE's competitor, Aruba ClearPass.  

[ammahend]

you already got some great inputs from others, my two cent, a lot of ISE value comes not just from radius and tacacs as there are many options for that, but also because it basically can stitch lot Cisco as well as third party security platforms together, it has a big eco system, so its a great platform to be familiar with.