Best IT Certifications for 2024

Earning specialized certifications is a surefire way to advance your career in the IT field, regardless of industry or current career level. The right certification validates your skills and knowledge, which makes you more desirable to future employers who want to attract and retain the best employees. Below, we’ll explore the top IT certifications and share how to examine your goals to choose the right path forward. 

We’ve narrowed IT certifications into specific categories to help IT professionals assess what’s available and pursue the best certifications to show their willingness to learn and develop the in-demand career skills employers want.

Database platforms have changed greatly over the years, but database technology remains important for various applications and computing tasks. Available certifications for IT professionals include those for database administrators (DBAs), database developers, data analysts and architects, business intelligence, and data warehousing specialists, and other data professionals.

Obtaining database certifications demonstrates an understanding of database concepts, design, implementation, administration and security. This can boost your credibility in the job market and show potential employers that you have the skills needed to work with databases. The best database certifications include the following:

SAS is one of the world’s leading firms for business analytics, data warehousing and data mining. Today, the SAS Global Certification Program offers 23 credentials across categories including foundation tools, advanced analytics, business intelligence, data management and administration.

SAS programmers remain in high demand, with a quick search of job boards showing thousands of open positions. Obtaining SAS certification shows employers that you are proficient in the company’s popular suite of tools. Some of SAS’s certification programs include the following: 

Many professionals earn certifications to help navigate their career paths. According to the IT Salary Report, 92 percent of information technology professionals have at least one certification.

Cisco Systems is a market leader not only in networking and communications products, but also storage networking and solutions for data centers. Cisco offers a variety of certifications for IT professionals, ranging from entry level credentials to expert-level exams. 

These certifications prepare professionals for Cisco-related careers. A search of job boards reveals thousands of open positions for Cisco experts, underscoring the continued relevance of these skills. Some of Cisco’s certifications include the following:

Dell Technologies remains one of the world’s leading computing companies. In addition to its well-known hardware lineup, Dell also offers solutions for networks, storage, servers, gateways and embedded computing, as well as a broad range of IT and business services.

Becoming certified in Dell products can help make IT professionals competitive in engineering roles for server, virtualization, networking, systems, integration and data security. Additional roles include consultants, account executives, system administrators, IT managers and deployment managers.

In the mobile era, it has become increasingly important for network engineers to support local, remote and mobile users, as well as provide proper infrastructure. The focus on application and app development now leans more toward mobile environments, requiring security professionals to thoroughly address mobility from all perspectives.

Due to the fast-changing nature of mobile technology, not many mobility certifications have become widely adopted. However, a few of the top mobility certifications can help IT professionals stand out in this rapidly evolving field. 

If part of your job includes selling and implementing an IT solution, you may want to pursue the best sales certifications. You’ll show your organization that you’re willing to go above and beyond to reach sales targets.

As remote and computer-based work has become more common, it’s more important than ever that businesses and individuals be able to maintain their hardware. While discussions about potential computer-related jobs often revolve around software work and coding, jumping into the IT field by becoming a computer technician is an excellent starting point.

Today, thousands of hardware technician jobs are available across the country. Entering this industry becomes more accessible for those who acquire computer hardware certifications. These certifications can showcase your expertise and proficiency in the upkeep of computers, mobile devices, printers and other hardware components.

IT pros with solid cloud computing skills continue to be in high demand as more companies adopt cloud technologies. Today, Google Cloud is one of the market leaders in the cloud computing space. 

Regardless of where you are in your IT career, engaging with certification programs can demonstrate your willingness to keep on top of rapidly evolving cloud technologies. To that end, Google has introduced a host of certifications for its cloud platform, including the following: 

In the fast-changing world of technology, it can help to focus on certifications that have stood the test of time. “Evergreen” refers to certifications that remain popular year after year. 

The top evergreen certifications are based on recent pay surveys in IT, reports from IT professionals about certifications they want or pursue the most, and those that appear most frequently in online job postings. Obtaining these credentials is one step toward ensuring that your skills remain relevant for a long time: 

IT governance provides structure for aligning a company’s IT with its business strategies. Organizations faced with compliance rigors always need experienced IT pros who can see the big picture and understand technology risks. This means certified IT governance professionals are likely to remain in high demand.

Earning one of the following certifications proves a commitment to understanding the role of IT governance and its position in a company’s current and future success. Getting certified can validate your expert knowledge and lead to advanced career opportunities.

An IT system administrator is responsible for managing and maintaining the information technology infrastructure within an organization. The position demands sought-after career skills, ranging from configuring and maintaining servers and clients to managing access controls, network services, and addressing application resource requirements.

If you’re in charge of managing modern servers, there’s a long list of tools and technologies that system administrators must master. Obtaining some of the most prominent system administrator certifications can demonstrate your mastery to potential employers. 

ITIL, or Information Technology Infrastructure Library, was developed to establish standardized best practices for IT services within government agencies. Over the ensuing four decades, businesses of all types embraced, modified, and extended ITIL, shaping it into a comprehensive framework for managing IT service delivery. 

The ITIL framework remains the benchmark for best practices in IT service and delivery management, offering certification programs that cater to IT professionals at all levels. These training and certification courses ensure that IT professionals stay well-prepared for the ongoing evolution in IT service delivery management. There are four certifications in the ITIL certification program:

An IT enterprise architect is responsible for designing and managing the overall structure and framework of an organization’s information technology system. Enterprise architect certifications are among the highest that an IT professional can achieve; fewer than 1 percent ultimately reach this level. 

Enterprise architects are among the highest-paid employees and consultants in the tech industry. These certifications can put IT professionals on a path to many lucrative positions. The average worker earns over six figures annually. Some top enterprise architect certifications are listed below:

To become an enterprise IT architect, you’ll need knowledge of systems deployment, design and architecture, as well as a strong business foundation.

CompTIA is a nonprofit trade association made up of more than 2,000 member organizations and 3,000 business partners. The organization’s vendor-neutral certification program is one of the best recognized in the IT industry. Since CompTIA developed its A+ credential in 1993, it has issued more than two million certifications.

CompTIA certifications are grouped by skill set and focus on the real-world skills IT professionals need. Armed with these credentials, you can demonstrate that you know how to manage and support IT infrastructure. 

A longtime leader in database software, Oracle also offers cloud solutions, servers, engineered systems, storage, and more. The company has more than 430,000 customers in 175 countries. 

Today, Oracle’s training program offers six certification levels that span 16 product categories with more than 200 individual credentials. Considering the depth and breadth of this program — and the number of Oracle customers — it’s no surprise that Oracle certifications are highly sought after. 

Vendor-specific certifications address a particular vendor’s hardware and software. For example, you can pursue Oracle certifications and Dell certifications to become an expert in those companies’ environments.

Business continuity and disaster recovery keep systems running and data available in the event of interruptions or faults. These programs bring systems back to normal operation after a disaster has occurred.

Business continuity and disaster recovery certifications are seeing a healthy uptrend as new cloud-based tools grow in popularity. While business continuity planning and disaster recovery planning have always been essential, they’re becoming more critical than ever — and IT certifications are following suit.

Cisco To Scoop Up Sentryo To Boost Industrial IoT Security

Cisco plans to acquire Industrial IoT provider Sentryo in a move that will give end users more visibility and protection over operational technology endpoints across their networks.

Cisco Systems Thursday revealed plans to acquire Sentryo, a French company that specializes in device visibility and security for industrial control system networks. The small but strategic deal will let Cisco offer more visibility and protection over operational technology (OT) endpoints on the network.

Financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed.

Many Internet of Things and most OT devices weren't designed with security in mind, a problem that businesses are running into as they deploy and attempt to scale their IoT use cases. Sentryo’s Industrial IoT/OT offerings help companies, specifically those in the energy, manufacturing, oil and gas, and transportation sectors, have greater visibility into all their connected endpoints and protect against cybersecurity attacks, Cisco said.

Combined, Cisco’s intent-based networking approach with Sentryo’s technologies will let end users more easily manage networks and devices at scale, boost collaboration across IT and OT departments, and better protect their assets and data, said Rob Salvagno, vice president of global corporate development for Cisco, in a blog post on the deal.

[Related: Cisco IoT Strategy Revolves Around Channel Partners: ‘They Are Critical In Driving Scale’]

OT devices, especially endpoints such as programmable logic controllers used to control a process such as oil refining or the work involved in a manufacturing line, and remote terminal units outside the building in a remote area need to be segmented so that these devices can communicate to the right systems while reducing the risk of cybersecurity incidents like WannaCry, said Liz Centoni, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager for IoT, in a blog post. Not only will the deal help customers with visibility, but it will help them handle segmentation and operations, Centoni said.

"With organizations digitizing, connecting formerly siloed systems and pushing for greater business intelligence, the need to do so in a secure way is more important than ever. With this acquisition we’re delivering the most secure network—from the networking hardware, to the operating software, and now to securing the operations critical to your success," she said.

The IT and OT buying centers are converging, said Nirav Sheth, vice president, worldwide partner architectures and presales engineering in Cisco’s Global Partner Organization, in an email to CRN.

"The acquisition of Sentryo will allow our partners to bring more visibility to OT assets, create new services opportunity by securing them, and deliver a unified management platform via Cisco DNA Center. Building on their expertise in intent-based networking, our IoT strategy opens the door for Cisco partners to expand into operational technology environments, such as oil and gas, utilities and manufacturing," Sheth said.

Cisco and Sentryo have worked together before. The two companies integrated Sentryo’s Edge Sensor and Cisco's industrial networking hardware within Cisco’s IOx application framework. "With the addition of Sentryo, Cisco can offer control systems engineers deeper visibility into assets to optimize, detect anomalies and secure their networks," Salvagno said.

San Jose, Calif.-based Cisco said that it expects the deal to close before the end of Cisco’s first-quarter fiscal year 2020, which is on Oct. 26, after it receives regularity approval in France and the U.S. Cisco said it is looking forward to welcoming the Sentryo team, which consists of 34 employees, to Cisco.

Cisco in 2016 completed its acquisition of Jasper, a privately held company based in Santa Clara, Calif., for its cloud-based IoT service platform that customers can use to launch, manage and monetize IoT services.

Cisco Says Cloud Traffic To Quadruple By 2019, Driven By Consumers, Mobility and IoT

The just-released Cisco Cloud Index computes the rapid expansion of today's stampede to the cloud. “We have never seen anything like this in terms of speed of customer adoption,” Oracle Co-CEO Mark Hurd said earlier this week, describing how his corporate customers have enthusiastically embraced the cloud.

One of them, General Electric , has moved, in just the last 18 months, 10% more of its computing load into the cloud, and expects to run 70% of its applications in the cloud by 2020. Last week, Amazon reported that its cloud business has surged 79% year-over-year and Microsoft announced that its cloud business has “more than doubled.”

Here are the highlights of Cisco's ongoing study of the growth of global data center and cloud-based data traffic.

Almost all of the work of IT will be done in cloud data centers

Based on its hands-on knowledge of the movement of data over global computer networks, Cisco predicts that , quadrupling from 2.1 zettabytes (2.1 trillion gigabytes) in 2014 to 8.6 zettabytes by the end of 2019.  and only 14% will be processed by traditional data centers.

Source: Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014–2019

Cloud traffic is expected to account for 83% of total data center traffic by 2019. Cloud traffic is a subset of data center traffic and is generated by cloud services accessible through the Internet from scalable, virtualized cloud data centers. Total data center traffic, which Cisco projects will reach 10.4 zettabytes by the end of 2019, is comprised of all traffic traversing within and between data centers as well as to end users.

10.4 trillion gigabytes is the equivalent of 144 trillion hours of streaming music or 6.8 trillion of high-definition (HD) movies viewed online. Ones and zeros are eating the world and the companies providing consumers with digital entertainment and other services have been at the forefront of the migration to the cloud.  Indeed, The Wall Street Journal has reported recently that Netflix has shut down the last of its data centers, moving the last piece of its IT infrastructure to the public cloud.

The public cloud will grow faster than the private cloud

Source: Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014–2019

While overall cloud workloads will grow at a CAGR of 27% from 2014 to 2019, the public cloud workloads are going to grow at 44% CAGR over that period, and private cloud (where cloud services are  delivered to corporate users by their IT department) workloads will grow at a slower pace of 16%. .

New sources of data, especially the Internet of Things, will keep the clouds very busy

Source: Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014–2019

The total volume of stored data on client devices and in data centers will more than double to reach 3.5 zettabytes by 2019. Most stored data resides in client devices today and will continue to do so over the next 5 years, but more data will move to the data center over time, representing 18% of all data in 2019, up from 12% in 2014.

In addition to larger volumes of stored data, the stored data will be coming from a wider range of devices by 2019. Currently, 73% of data stored on client devices resides on PCs. By 2019, stored data on PCs will go down to 49%, with a greater portion of data on smartphones, tablets, and machine-to-machine (M2M) modules. Stored data associated with M2M will grow at a faster rate than any other device category at an 89% CAGR.

A broad range of Internet of Things (IoT) applications are generating large volumes of data that could reach, Cisco estimates, 507.5 zettabytes annually by 2019. That’s 49 times greater than the projected data center traffic for 2019 (10.4 zettabytes). Today, only a small portion of this content is stored in data centers, but that could change as big data analytics tools are applied to greater volumes of the data collected and transmitted by IoT applications.

The figure below maps several M2M applications for their frequency of network communications, average traffic per connection, and data analytic needs. Applications such as smart metering can benefit from real-time analytics of aggregated data that can optimize the usage of resources such as electricity, gas, and water. On the other hand, applications such as emergency services and environment and public safety can be much enhanced through distributed real-time analytics that can help make real-time decisions that affect entire communities. Although some other applications such as manufacturing and processing can have potential efficiencies from real-time analytics, their need is not very imminent.

The size of the bubble represents total M2M connections for each application. Source: Cisco Global... [+] Cloud Index, 2014–2019; Machina Research

More consumers will keep their data in the cloud

Cisco estimates that by 2019, 55% (2 billion) of the Internet-connected consumer population will use personal cloud storage, up from 42% (1.1 billion users) in 2014.

Source: Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014–2019; Juniper Research

Global consumer cloud storage traffic will grow from 14 exabytes (14 billion gigabytes) annually in 2014 to 39 exabytes by 2019 at a 23% CAGR. This growth translates to per-user traffic of 1.6 gigabytes per month by 2019, compared to 992 megabytes per month in 2014.

*Consumer cloud storage traffic includes personal content lockers, cloud backup, etc., and does not... [+] include cloud DVR. Source: Cisco Global Cloud Index, 2014–2019

Ones and zeros are eating the world and today we got fresh insights into how much, how fast, and how their movement changes the way IT services are delivered to businesses and consumers.  For more data and the study’s methodology, go to the Cisco Global Cloud Index webpage.