The Internet of Everything (IoE) -bringing together people, process, data, and things to make networked connections more relevant and valuable than ever before -is accelerating the pace of digital transformation.

This new age of the digital economy presents unprecedented challenges for all CEOs and business leaders. In today's dynamic business environment, enterprises are under more pressure than ever to drive business outcomes. Innovation, ability to quickly adapt to new challenges and market conditions, as well as proficient leverage of new technologies are all critical in determining success. In addition, the IT landscape is evolving with more connected and mobile endpoints, the growth of application based services, and the need to collect, analyze and utilize an explosion of data.

Furthermore, CEOs, CIOs, and line-of-business (LoB) leaders are playing a stronger role in shaping requirements as they strive for tangible, business outcomes. To stay relevant, IT departments are expected to lead more impactful strategic initiatives, align with their organization's business objectives, leverage the dynamic technology landscape and improve customer experiences.

Business leaders are embracing Cloud to accelerate business delivery. A recent study indicates that 78 percent of the workloads will be processed in the cloud by 2018. Cloud brings agility, automation and orchestration, without the associated infrastructure, management, and technical issues.

With an estimated 50 billion devices and objects expected to be connected to the network by 2020, businesses are also seeing the need to connect the unconnected, enabling more timely and accurate decision making to truly transform the business. All this change is creating a shift in technology job roles. For instance, World Bank Studies estimate that 220,000 new engineers will be needed every year from 2014-2022. IT professionals must adapt in order to take full advantage of IoE's opportunities, which requires new knowledge and skill sets. CIOs and CEOs need to focus on individuals with this new set of skills.

With this in mind, Cisco continues building on its comprehensive IoE strategy with its introduction of new Cloud and IoT Certifications. These additions focus on the ability of IT professionals to connect the unconnected, automate and orchestrate services and provide the infrastructure to enable real-time data analytics in a pervasive manner. With the growing demand for these skills, our new portfolio additions will prove invaluable in the development of tomorrow's workforce, helping individuals and their employers deliver business outcomes that equate to customer success.

The new CCNA and CCNP Cloud certifications enable professionals to build private and hybrid cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service, allowing IT to enable and control enterprise-wide cloud deployments in a consistent, centralized manner. Cloud implementations are not limited to the traditional enterprise environments. As organizations recognize the value of converging the industrial plant floor with their IT infrastructure, the gap in skills required to remotely manage such a convergence is becoming apparent. The CCNA Industrial Networking certification provides the necessary skills required to successfully implement and troubleshoot converged IT and industrial networks. Cisco partnered with manufacturing experts at Rockwell Automation to help IT professionals in the OT space develop and oversee new and complex network infrastructures in the Industrial Internet of Things.

Learn more about these new offerings or read the full news here.