Cisco revises data centre certifications
Fri 20 Jan 2017
Cisco has announced a significant update to its data center certification program. The CCNA, CCNP and CCIE training and testing have been completely revised to reflect sophisticated data center skills requirements.
The company has also announced a new portfolio of data and analytics training and certification programs.
The data center certification track has been completely updated, from learning materials to examinations. The changes were made to reflect key skills and best practices for modern data center management. These include network management, streamlining operations, and automation. Skills sets that are taught and tested also include securing required data center resources, as well as knowing how to create a policy and use it to mobilize physical resources and virtual resources across the data center.
The new certification is intended to emphasize practical applications of knowledge through a hands-on curriculum.
Once certified, employees will have proven skills to lead enterprise transformation including streamlining processes and managing cloud integration initiatives.
The associate level CCNA certification verifies that an employee is able to configure, operate and troubleshoot networks, on-site and remotely. The professional-level CCNP is focused on the planning and implementation of local and wide-area enterprise networks.
CCIE is the expert-level certification, applied to engineers who are equipped to plan, operate and troubleshoot complex network infrastructure.
Tejas Vashi, senior director of product strategy and marketing said that Cisco is helping to prepare employees for skills required in changing data center and IT environments. With Cisco certified practitioners, he added, “enterprises benefit from faster deployments, more efficient operations and better business outcomes with their IT infrastructure.”
The new data and analytics courses are focused on teaching flexible data integration for streamlining and simplifying data access. Specifically, the course ‘Big Data and Analytics’ emphasizes the design of scalable data center solutions using Cisco integrated infrastructure products. Data Virtualization, on the other hand, educates employees with hands-on training using the Cisco Data Virtualization Platform.
In December, Cisco announced its intention to drop the billion-dollar public cloud project, revising the company’s focus to virtualization and enterprise hybrid cloud solutions. Upgrading certifications, to make them more attractive to customers in this changing environment, is one way to promote that change to existing enterprise customers.
