I want to echo this, as it's my situation, too. I was a software guy for 5 years, then went off to learn networking and security stuff, because I thought I'd be a better programmer. Got stuck in networking because it was easy, and my eye for detail made me valuable. But, networking, unless you're doing something really complex, gets boring. I'm now taking advantage of my networking/operations skills by automating operations tasks. It's a heck of a lot more fun than daily care-and-feeding of routers and switches (or even network design).
People seem to like to call this "DevOps", but it's really operations automation engineering. If networking interests you, I'd find the networking guys at your company, and get to know where their process is painful, and help them figure out how to get rid of the pain. Working closely with another team should make you less likely to be outsourceable.