CCDA (Cisco Certified Design Associate)

Majority of the enterprises require networks that are designed for its availability, smooth performance, and scalability with the flexibility to meet the rising number of demands. In order to meet the following challenges faced by every other enterprise today, skilled IT professionals are in demand that possess fundamental network design skills. 

For a network design engineer, sales engineer, system engineer or individuals looking to build and validate Cisco Network Design Fundamental knowledge the CCDA certification program focuses on design methodologies and objectives, addressing and routing protocols and network expansion considerations within the basic campus, data center, voice, security and wireless networks. 

CCDA Eligibility Criteria 

Candidates interested in pursuing a Cisco Certified Design Associate certification will have to possess a valid CCENT or a valid CCNA Routing and Switching or any CCIE certification which is valid for three years can act as a prerequisite. One has to pass any of the following before your certification expires. However, there is no specific eligibility criteria for candidates willing to pursue the certification.

• Pass any current Associate-level exam except for ICND1 exam, or
• Pass any current 642-XXX Professional-level or any 300-XXX Professional-level exam, or
• Pass any current 642-XXX Cisco Specialist exam (excluding Sales Specialist exams or Meeting Place Specialist exams, Implementing Cisco Telepresence Installations (ITI) exams, Cisco Leading Virtual Classroom Instruction exams or any 650 online exams), or
• Pass any current CCIE Written Exam, or
• Pass the current CCDE Written Exam OR current CCDE Practical Exam, or
• Pass the Cisco Certified Architect (CCAr) interview AND the CCAr board review to extend lower certifications.

The daily job responsibilities of average enterprise network designers or engineers are becoming increasingly fluid and will continue to grow in the coming years. What initially was a relatively static role responsible for managing the transport frames and packets from point A to point B has now evolved into a liaison between the admins responsible for the network, the servers, and the storage infrastructure.

Because network designers sit at the heart of the infrastructure, they are now required to have a deep understanding of the applications and data riding across the network. This is especially true given the fact that the silos of server and storage administration are being torn down thanks to technologies such as virtualization. In addition to these, there are some basic skills required by a Network Engineer, to be able to work effectively in an organization.

Following are the skillsets of a Network Design Associate:

Skills	Description
Application Flow	Having a clear understanding of how applications work from a data flow perspective will be critical regardless of whether you need to configure advanced Quality of Service (QoS), or are deploying software-defined networking in the data center or over the WAN.
Cyber Security	With today’s unified threat management (UTM) technologies, network engineers play a much greater role in the architecture and support of an end-to-end unified security solution that stretches from the endpoint to the cloud and beyond.
SD-WAN	Network designers will be required to understand when SD-WAN products are a good fit and when to stick with managed WAN services such as MPLS.
DNS	Network designers hardly had any understanding of how DNS functions internally and externally in an enterprise. But in today’s modern networks along with the growing security problems revolving around DNS – this skill set has rocketed to the top of the list.
Internet of Things (IOT)	Along with network designers being asked to size and scale their wired and wireless networks in order to accommodate thousands of IoT sensors, they will also be largely responsible for securing the devices once they connect to the corporate network. This will eventually make them an integral part of any IoT rollout where you will be expected to provide guidance and set policy for IoT connectivity and data security.
Visualising Network Components	Skills in the understanding of how to virtualize network services and functions are going to be in high demand. This makes Networks Designers to have a knowledge of the same in order to succeed in the field.
Network Automation	Networks are becoming far more organic in how they dynamically handle traffic, push policy, and provision new resources. This now is causing engineers to burn countless hours on repetitive tasks. Thus, one great new skill to learn is how to script and hook into various APIs to automate many network processes.
Hyper-converged Systems	Hyper-convergence is all about the consolidation of computing, data storage, and networking functions into a unified system. Network engineers will need to understand the management tools for deploying and operating hyper-converged systems. IT will look to the network engineers to understand how the hyper-converged systems works from one end of the technology stack to the other so that the system is optimized for the applications that run across it.

The Cisco Certified Design Associates Certification is for candidates willing to pursue their career as Network Designers, Network Engineers, Support Engineers and Technicians. Such candidates require basic understanding of network design fundamentals.

The course curriculum for CCDA certification focuses on design basic campus, security, and voice & wireless networks.

The certification program presents a structured and modular approach to designing networks that are scalable, resilient, and have well-defined failure domains. The course curriculum discusses routing and switching design of Campus and Enterprise networks in detail. The data center, wireless networking, and real-time traffic infrastructure are introduced and their effects on the core network are discussed from the design perspective.

Course Prerequisites

It is strongly recommended, but not required, that students have the following knowledge and skills:

• A Cisco CCNA Routing and Switching certification and practical experience with deploying and operating networks based on Cisco network devices and Cisco IOS software
• Implementing Cisco Wireless Network Fundamentals (WIFUND) level knowledge of wireless topics
• Complete the Implementing Cisco IP Switched Networks (SWITCH) course

Course Objectives

Upon completing this course, students will be able to:

• Describe and apply network design methodologies
• Describe and apply network design concepts of modularity and hierarchy
• Design a resilient and scalable Campus network
• Design a resilient and scalable connectivity between parts of your Enterprise network
• Design connectivity to the Internet and internal routing for your network
• Integrate collaboration and wireless infrastructure into your core network
• Create scalable IPv4 and IPv6 addressing
• Describe what software-defined networks are and describe example solutions

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