ISCW/ONT Certification

Although Cisco are removing the ISCW/ONT exams at the end of July this year, it is stil a worthwhile content to cover outside of basic certification and for those still planning on sitting it.

With that in mind, I'll also be covering topics within those subjects and tagging them as ISCW or ONT. I haven't done a full breakdown of the new cert as yet so I can't confirm what is moving to Route/Switch/Tshoot and what is being dropped altogether as they bring the cert more in line with the new version CCIE route/switch.

Personally I think it's been slightly short sighted of Cisco as the ISCW and ONT gave good foundations on subjects from other areas of study, without you having to study fields like CCIP,CCVP or CCSP. Many people taking the CCNP will already work in the network admin field so useful though the troubleshooting will be to some, to many of us its a null topic (or should be) but missing out on some of the other data is a shame just to make the certs more linear.

That said, I haven't seen the full breakdown of the new exams so hopefully most will survive.

To save confusion later down the line, I'll dual tag the posts for the subject area and the old/new certs so make it easier for people to see.

Topics covered in ISCW/ONT are :

IIN/SONA - Hierarchical network models.
Cable
DSL
Wireless
Entry level VOIP
Frame mode MPLS
basic MPLS VPNs
Quality of Service
AAA
Router hardening
Basic SNMP
VPN (ipsec/gre)
IOS Firewall (CBAC)
IPS/IDS (basic router version, not dedicated devices)

So keep following folks! as ever, suggestions/requests can be submitted by comment or email.