I was the same with the CCNA sitting I think what was the very last ICND2 in the UK and involved a 600 mile round trip for the test centre which really piled on the pressure.
The question now is whether to proceed to a CCNP which work have offered to fund this year but I'm not sure, from what I've read it's a lot tougher than the CCNA and much more Cisco specific. On one hand if they're offering to pay for it then I should take advantage but I found the CCNA hard work and I'm not sure how useful the CCNP will be as I don't support beyond our routers which are not too complex. At the moment what I'd really like to work on is Cisco wireless and firewalls since that's definitely something I need for my job and a big gap at the moment.
Longer term I realise a CCNP is great for a CV but I work in a reasonably rural area with few large companies and the other big one here use Juniper rather than Cisco and the CCNP on its own is just a certification and needs experience to back it up.
As someone familiar with the certifications I'd be interested to hear your thoughts.
A lot of the time I'm not keen on moving systems to the cloud but I don't miss having a local Exchange server. Years ago I joined a small company which had their Exchange server running on an old
P2 400 (this was well into the
P4 era) because no-one wanted to touch it since it worked. General performance was awful as you'd expect and restarting it was horrendous taking around 45 minutes of nail biting moments for it to get back into Windows and Exchange to be available.