CCNP

No, I think that's a really great example of proactivity, right? You've already achieved an entry-level certification and you're looking to take the next step.

You're looking to go from Network Plus to Security Plus or to CISSP or from CCNA to CCNP.

And, you know, that's a really great use for this as well because we want to help people within that journey.

So definitely not a disqualifier.

The problem with telephone systems is everything gets routed through very specific, what are called COs, central offices to get routed to the next point, right? So if somebody plinks a central office, It's amazing how much communication capacity disappears in the blink of the eye, right? It's like, oh, fuck, right? We have no way to route the calls anywhere else, right? The point of the internet, the point of IPv4 and routable protocols and that type of thing is so if one central node literally gets nuked, everything routes around it.

I had a buddy of mine who... who was a CCNP for a company who had a lot of equipment in the World Trade Center back when 9-11 happened.

And one of the things he said was fascinating when 9-11 happened.

So when the World Trade Centers fell, the World Trade Centers were actually a major networking communications hub because I guess they figured, hey, look, they're the World Trade Center.

The savings are real, and they're not free.

You need people who are both Linux people and networking people, and a CCNP who's never touched Linux needs three to six months of ramp-up before they're useful on it.

FRR has actual scaling limits.

A single instance doesn't scale much past 150 BGP peers.

Today, we're spotlighting how you can level up your security credentials for Cyber Security Month.

Our panel is exploring key updates to the CCNP security blueprint, how to tackle the new Escort exam, and all the promotions and free training rolling out across Cisco U.

But before we get into that, let's get started with introductions.

Richard, from our Cisco Champions, let's start with you.

[laughs]

... let's break it down.

What are the new things? Well, what's, what's new with CCNP security?

That, that's the big thing we've been working on this year and really since last year, is the CCNP security update.

The day-to-day maintaining is on the engineers.

The decisions I make, how complicated the design is going to be or the direction we want to move, I have to always think about those guys who may not be CCNP level, might be a CCNA level guy who doesn't have super knowledgeable stuff, has to maintain this and has to troubleshoot it.

It has to be simple enough so anyone on our team can still operate the network.

So that's the biggest challenge that I've found, because especially we're doing a Nexus dashboard conversion right now, our data center going into the Nexus dashboard.