CCNP — Enterprise Networking

This course is preparation, not certification. The Cisco CCNP Enterprise exam is booked and paid for separately with Cisco, and no institute can guarantee a result.

Beyond a single OSPF area.

• Multi-area OSPF hands on
  Area types, summarisation and why a flat design stops scaling.
• EIGRP hands on
  Metrics, feasible successors and convergence.
• BGP fundamentals hands on
  Peering, path selection and route policy - the protocol the internet runs on.
• Redistribution hands on
  Between protocols, and the routing loop it creates when done carelessly.

Networks that survive a failure.

• Advanced spanning tree hands on
  Rapid and multiple instance, and root bridge placement that is chosen rather than accidental.
• First hop redundancy hands on
  HSRP and VRRP, and testing the failover rather than assuming it.
• Campus design hands on
  Access, distribution and core - and when a two-tier design is the right answer.
• QoS hands on
  Classification, queuing and why voice suffers first.

Connecting sites.

• VPN technologies hands on
  IPsec, GRE and DMVPN.
• SD-WAN concepts
  What it replaces and what it does not.
• VRFs hands on
  Separating traffic on shared infrastructure.
• WAN in Pakistan
  Multiple ISPs, failover and the realities of local connectivity.

Hardening an enterprise network.

• Infrastructure hardening hands on
  Control plane policing, AAA and named administrative access.
• Advanced ACLs and filtering hands on
  Including the rule that silently blocks something important.
• Network services hands on
  DHCP relay, NTP, syslog and SNMP at scale.
• Segmentation hands on
  Keeping finance, guests and operations genuinely apart.

The part of the modern exam people underestimate.

• APIs, JSON and REST on network devices hands on
  Reading and changing configuration programmatically.
• Python for network engineers hands on
  Scripts that configure fifty switches without fifty logins.
• Ansible for network configuration hands on
  Declarative configuration, and the value of idempotency.
• Monitoring and telemetry
  Knowing about the fault before the phone rings.

Structured diagnosis under pressure.

• A method for complex faults hands on
  Halving the problem space rather than guessing.
• Reading a packet capture hands on
  Confirming what is actually on the wire.
• Broken-lab drills hands on
  Multi-layer faults injected without warning.
• Documenting the fix hands on
  So the next engineer, or you in six months, is not starting again.

Before you start

• CCNA, or equivalent working knowledge
  Not negotiable. This course assumes subnetting, VLANs and OSPF are already comfortable.

Where it leads

• Cyber Security
  Network depth plus security is a strong and uncommon combination here.

Roles this prepares you for

• Network Engineer
  The role this course targets.
• Senior Network Support
  ISPs, banks and larger enterprises.
• Network Automation Engineer
  For those who took to the scripting module.

Interested in this programme?

Try the subject free first — there is no reason to pay before you know you like it.