This question has been following the CCNA around for at least five years. Every time cloud adoption accelerates, someone writes a take suggesting that traditional networking certifications are on their way out. And every time I encounter that take, I have the same reaction: this person has not spent much time in actual enterprise infrastructure environments recently.
The CCNA question is worth answering carefully because there are legitimate nuances that a dismissive “yes obviously” or “it depends” response does not capture. Let me give you the full picture as I see it in mid-2024.
The CCNA, Cisco’s Certified Network Associate credential, validates foundational networking knowledge across routing and switching, network fundamentals, IP services, security fundamentals, automation, and programmability. The most recent version of the exam, which Cisco consolidated into a single 200-301 exam in 2020, represents a thoughtful update that included automation and software-defined networking concepts alongside the traditional routing and switching content. That update was deliberate and it reflects where network engineering has actually gone.
The case for the CCNA being very much alive starts with the physical reality of enterprise networking. Cloud adoption has not eliminated on-premises network infrastructure. It has added cloud networking as an additional layer that must integrate with on-premises infrastructure. Organizations with significant on-premises footprints, manufacturing, healthcare, retail, financial services, and government in particular, have not moved their entire network infrastructure to the cloud and are not going to in any near-term timeframe. The Cisco equipment installed in enterprise data centers and campuses represents capital investments that have ten to fifteen year useful life cycles. The network engineers who support that infrastructure need the foundational knowledge the CCNA validates.
The hybrid reality is actually the strongest argument for the CCNA right now. Understanding how traffic flows between an on-premises campus network and a cloud VPC, how routing between them works, how security policies span both environments, requires understanding traditional networking concepts deeply before you can reason clearly about how the cloud layer interacts with them. Network engineers who learned networking entirely in cloud-native environments sometimes struggle with the on-premises integration work precisely because they do not have the foundational layer that the CCNA represents.
There is also the matter of where network automation is heading. The CCNA now includes meaningful content on programmability, network automation with Python, REST APIs, and infrastructure as code concepts as they apply to network configuration. These are skills that matter whether you are working with on-premises Cisco gear, cloud networking abstractions, or the SD-WAN overlays that many organizations are deploying to bridge the two. Understanding the fundamentals makes the automation layer more coherent, not less relevant.
The CCNP and CCIE tracks continue the progression for professionals who specialize more deeply in networking. Cisco maintains the full current certification details at the Cisco certifications page and the track structure is worth understanding before you plan your path beyond the CCNA.
Where the CCNA is less clearly justified is if your career is firmly in cloud-native environments where you are working primarily with virtual networking abstractions and never touching physical infrastructure or its configuration. If that describes you and your target employers, the AWS Advanced Networking Specialty or Azure Network Engineer Associate might be more directly applicable credentials to pursue alongside whatever foundational networking knowledge you need to function in those environments.
But for the substantial portion of IT infrastructure work that happens in hybrid environments, in on-premises-heavy enterprises, and in the network engineering career path more broadly, the CCNA is not a legacy credential that the industry has outgrown. It is a well-designed foundational certification that has been updated to reflect where networking has gone, and the foundational knowledge it validates is not being replaced by cloud. It is being extended by it.
Brian Rhoades is a Senior VMware Instructor and IT veteran with more than 15 years of hands-on experience in virtualization, systems engineering, and cloud infrastructure. He has trained thousands of IT professionals to confidently work with VMware vSphere, vSAN, and NSX, and has authored multiple books and study guides for outlets across the industry. Brian has a habit of being somewhere new every few weeks, which if you've ever tried to pin down a good VMware instructor, explains a lot.