Best practices for enabling SSH on network equipment?

A large majority of our corporate networking equipment does not have SSH enabled. Makes it very annoying having to physically console in everytime I need to make a change. I inherited this network from someone who never bothered to enable it because he rarely made config changes (he sucked in a lot of ways).

I know that SSH is secure, but are there any risks of enabling it? And does anyone have any best practices in mind for enabling SSH? Just want to make sure. And for the record, this will NOT be port forwarded out of our router. Only local access. I'm still relatively new to networking so any help is appreciated!