Enterprises are looking to design and deploy network infrastructure that responds faster to change. Cisco Digital Network Architecture (DNA) can help organizations get in front of this market movement by providing a flexible, programmable and open architecture, delivering the foundation for transitioning your business, operations, and technology strategies to achieve digitization.

With Cisco DNA,

• The business extracts actionable intelligence from the network such as the location of users and enables the Internet of Things (or something to that effect)
• The IT team harnesses automation and is freed to work on higher-level and more innovative tasks
• The network can identify advanced security threats that bypass other means of detection and quickly remediate those vulnerabilities

These opportunities are real, and they are here. To take advantage of them, IT professionals need to evolve their skills for the digital era, and be able to grapple with emerging technology trends, such as IoT, cloud and software-defined networking (SDN).

And in today's digitized business, these skills are more interconnected than ever before. Security supports the deployment of IoT environments and SDN architectures that enable the launch of large and diverse cloud environments through optimizing automation.

Cisco has introduced a major refresh of its industry leading career certifications to align with new skill areas: the new and revised CCIE framework. It will go live this month, and is designed to ensure that IT professionals have the skill sets that empower them to design and maintain the IT infrastructure of today and tomorrow.

But we're not stopping there.

In July, at CiscoLive, Cisco introduced a major refresh of our Network Programmability Specialist certification, which addresses the evolving role of the engineer, leveraging the powerful level of abstraction of controller-based architectures to create real added value for customers through APIs and automation.

The new Cisco Network Programmability Design and Implementation Specialist curriculum covers:

• Network programmability fundamentals, including Python
• Data models, including YANG, Nexus, ACI and UCS
• Enterprise, data center, service provider and security APIs
• DevOps methodologies and network automation with tools like Puppet, Ansible and VIRL
• SDN Controllers including APIC, APIC-EM and Open SDN Controller

Cisco is also seeding these skills across our certification portfolio. We updated the CCNA for Routing and Switching in May, so the massive pool of network engineers who use the CCNA Routing and Switching as their launchpad, start off on the right foot with a certification that has evolved to meet the changing demands of the enterprise network. The refreshed CCNA Routing and Switching addresses the skills needed to manage programmable networks, while weaving in key elements of virtualization and cloud services that today's network engineer will need to address when designing, deploying and managing enterprise networks.

Looking Ahead

The digitization of the business is creating massive opportunities for our customers, who are racing to future-proof their infrastructures in order to take advantage of emerging trends.

This is good for networking professionals -over the short term, and over the long term.

With DNA, Cisco is taking IT talent to a new level. By upskilling with SDN capabilities, networking engineers and developers can become strategic business partners within their own organizations.

The IT jobs of the future are being defined now, and Cisco is dedicated to providing certified experts with the education they need. The program enhancements we are sharing will continue supporting learners in developing the IT skills needed to support business outcomes, and will empower organizations to gain the confidence that their workforce is trained and skilled to maximize investments in key technologies.

Join in the #CiscoChat discussion on August 11th at 12pm PST, to learn about#CiscoDNA certifications.