ServiceNow CIS-CPG Retired: What Holders and Candidates Do Next

Updated on 8 October 2026. What’s new: CIS-CPG retired by ServiceNow on 30 June 2025; this guide now covers what holders keep and which credentials replace it.

If you were planning to sit the ServiceNow Cloud Provisioning and Governance exam, stop before you buy anything: ServiceNow retired the CIS-CPG exam on 30 June 2025. The courses behind it retired the same day, and holders' achievements stopped being shown as current in ServiceNow University after 31 December 2025. No new CIS-CPG certificates are being issued.

That leaves two groups of people with real questions. Candidates who were halfway through their preparation want to know where that effort should go now. People who passed the exam want to know what their credential is worth, whether they still have to pay anything, and how to describe it on a CV. This guide answers both, using ServiceNow's own retirement FAQ for the APM and CPG certifications and the final exam blueprint, which ServiceNow still publishes with a retirement notice at the top.

It also keeps something the old version of this page tried to teach: how a governed cloud request works. The exam has gone, but the problem it tested has not. Organisations still need cloud resources to be requested, limited, approved and recorded, and the people who understood that layer are the ones best placed to move on to whatever ServiceNow credential fits their work next.

Is the ServiceNow CIS-CPG certification still available?

No. The Certified Implementation Specialist - Cloud Provisioning and Governance exam can no longer be booked, the vouchers can no longer be bought, and the two on-demand courses that unlocked the exam have been withdrawn. ServiceNow retired the Certified Implementation Specialist - Application Portfolio Management (CIS-APM) credential at the same time and under the same FAQ, so anything said here about dates applies to both.

ServiceNow's explanation is short and specific. The Cloud Provisioning and Governance and Application Portfolio Management products "changed scope and evolved into new products", so the training and certifications built around them had to change too. Its credentialing programme validates knowledge of products as they exist, and once a product is reshaped, an exam written for the old shape stops measuring anything useful.

That matters for how you read any material that still circulates. Study guides, question collections, forum posts and course listings written before mid-2025 describe an exam that no longer runs. Some of them will keep ranking in search results for years. If a page offers you a CIS-CPG exam date, voucher or bootcamp today, it is out of date, whatever it says.

What about the APM exam that retired with it?

The APM credential took a slightly different road. ServiceNow moved application portfolio work into its Enterprise Architecture courses and created an Enterprise Architecture Delivery Accreditation. Cloud Provisioning and Governance was given two successors in the same FAQ: the Cloud Accelerate Bootcamp Accreditation and that same Enterprise Architecture Delivery Accreditation. We come back to both later, because they are not like-for-like replacements.

When did each part of CIS-CPG retire, and what happened on each date?

ServiceNow did not switch everything off on one day. The retirement ran across most of 2025, and each date closed a different door. If you are trying to work out whether a colleague's certificate, a training record or an invoice from that year is still meaningful, these are the dates to check it against.

Date	What changed	Who it affected
15 January to 15 April 2025	The 2025 Certification Maintenance Program (CMP) fee window	CPG holders who also held another ServiceNow certification
1 April 2025	Last day to enrol in Cloud Provisioning and Governance Fundamentals On Demand and Cloud Provisioning and Governance Advanced On Demand	Candidates who had not yet started the required training
30 June 2025	Both on-demand courses retired; the exam retired; last day to buy a voucher, sit the exam or retake it	Anyone still preparing
31 December 2025	Certification achievements stopped being shown as current in ServiceNow University	Everyone who held CIS-CPG

Two details in the FAQ are easy to miss. First, there were no refunds for vouchers that had already been bought; ServiceNow's position was that buyers had until 30 June 2025 to register and sit the exam. Second, a candidate who failed on the final day could not book a retake, because retakes were only possible up to that same date. ServiceNow advised candidates more than once not to leave the attempt until the last week, and anyone who did is now out of options.

The FAQ also confirms there was no Xanadu delta exam for CPG. Delta exams are the short release-update tests ServiceNow uses to keep a mainline certification current; with the credential retiring, there was nothing to keep current.

I already hold CIS-CPG: is it still valid, and can I still list it?

You passed a real, proctored exam, and nothing takes that away. What changed is its status. ServiceNow's FAQ says certification achievements remained current in ServiceNow University until 31 December 2025, and that once the certifications retire, "your certification achievement status will no longer be current". In plain terms, your profile no longer shows CIS-CPG as an active credential.

ServiceNow also answers the CV question directly: yes, you can keep the certification on your resume if you feel it is valuable to represent the credential. The honest way to do that is to give the dates, for example "ServiceNow Certified Implementation Specialist - Cloud Provisioning and Governance (retired by ServiceNow, 2025)". A reader who knows the ecosystem will recognise the product and the year, and nobody will think you are claiming a live credential.

Did holders have to pay the 2025 maintenance fee?

It depended on what else you held. The FAQ splits holders into two cases:

• CPG plus at least one other ServiceNow certification. You had to pay the 2025 CMP fee in the window from 15 January to 15 April 2025. If you did not pay it, all of your certifications expired, not just the retiring one.
• CPG and nothing else. You were not required to pay the 2025 CMP fee.

If you are reading this because a colleague's other certifications vanished from their profile in spring 2025, the first case is a likely reason. The FAQ points to ServiceNow's separate CMP FAQ for the detail, and that is where any appeal or question about a lapsed credential belongs.

Does the old credential turn into one of the new ones?

No. ServiceNow says so explicitly for APM holders and the Enterprise Architecture accreditation: certifications do not automatically transition into the new accreditation. The same logic applies to CPG. If you want one of the successor credentials, you take its course and its exam like anybody else. The FAQ also makes clear that completing the new courses is your choice, not an obligation that comes with holding the old certificate.

What did ServiceNow put in place of CIS-CPG?

ServiceNow names two successors. The first is the Cloud Accelerate Bootcamp Accreditation, a course and exam pairing. The second is the Enterprise Architecture Delivery Accreditation, which sits on top of two newer on-demand courses, Enterprise Architecture Fundamentals and Enterprise Architecture Implementation.

The important word is accreditation. ServiceNow draws a clear line between its two kinds of credential, and the FAQ spells it out:

Feature	Mainline certification (what CIS-CPG was)	Accreditation (what replaced it)
Exam conditions	High-stakes, proctored	Non-proctored
Ongoing maintenance	Required: delta exams and the annual CMP fee	None
Typical purpose	Independent proof of implementation skill	Confirmation that you completed delivery training

So the replacement is lighter in both directions. It costs you less effort to keep, and it carries less weight as independent proof, because nobody watched you take it. For many delivery roles inside partners and customers that trade is fine; the accreditation shows you have been trained on the current product, which is exactly what a project lead wants to know. For a candidate who wanted a proctored credential to strengthen a job application, it is a different kind of signal.

Which successor fits which person?

If your interest in CPG was mostly about the cloud side, connecting providers, shaping what can be ordered and keeping consumption under control, the Cloud Accelerate Bootcamp route is the closer match in spirit. If your work was really about portfolios, architecture and how applications map to business capabilities, the Enterprise Architecture route is where ServiceNow has put that subject now. Read the current course descriptions in ServiceNow University before you choose, because both are newer than the retired exam and their content belongs to today's releases.

What did the final CIS-CPG exam cover, and does any of it still count?

ServiceNow has left the last CIS-CPG exam blueprint online, marked as retired and dated January 2025. It is worth reading even now, because it is the most precise description ServiceNow ever published of what a cloud-governance implementer was expected to know. The exam had 45 questions and a 90-minute limit, booked through Kryterion's Webassessor platform at a test centre or online with a remote proctor.

Learning domain	Share of the exam	Sub-topics listed by ServiceNow
Administration and Setup	38%	Cloud accounts, alert configuration, resource profiles, permissions, quotas, policies, UI form manipulation, billing, tags, budget consumption, troubleshooting
Templates	11%	CloudFormation templates, Azure ARM templates, Terraform, template versioning, CPG customisation, post-provision operations
Resource Blocks and CAPI	33%	Resource blocks, CAPI components and operations, CAPI extensions, response processors, expressions
Cloud Providers	18%	AWS, Azure, VMware

Two things stand out. Administration and Setup alone carried well over a third of the paper, and most of that domain is governance rather than building: who may order what, at what cost, with which tags and within which budget. And the Resource Blocks and CAPI domain, the Cloud API layer that lets the platform talk to providers, carried a third on its own. The exam was never mainly about clouds. It was about the control layer ServiceNow puts in front of them.

What did ServiceNow expect candidates to have done first?

The blueprint listed two required courses, Cloud Provisioning and Governance Fundamentals and Cloud Provisioning and Governance Advanced, and only after the advanced course could a candidate obtain the voucher to register. Recommended preparation included Welcome to ServiceNow, ServiceNow System Administration Fundamentals, Get Started with Now Create, Configuration Management Database (CMDB) Fundamentals, and intermediate cloud administration knowledge of AWS or Azure. The recommended experience went further: about six months on ServiceNow deployments, six months implementing IT Operations Management (ITOM) solutions specifically for cloud provisioning, plus Windows and Unix administration, JavaScript and regular-expression scripting, and some networking.

That list is a useful mirror. If you have most of it, you already have the foundation the successor accreditations and the other ITOM credentials build on. If you were missing several items, those gaps are where to spend your time now, whichever credential you pick.

Which cloud-governance skills carry over to other ServiceNow work?

Almost all of the thinking does, even where product names have changed. The core idea behind CPG was that a cloud provider's own tooling builds the resource, while ServiceNow decides who may request it, with which inputs, within which limits, after whose approval, and with what record left behind. Describing infrastructure in a template that a tool reads is usually called infrastructure as code; the governance layer around those templates is the part ServiceNow cared about, and it is the part employers still ask about.

The clearest way to see what transfers is to follow one request, as the exam used to. A developer needs a medium Linux machine for two weeks of testing. The cloud team wants it in an approved region, tagged to the team, stopped overnight and approved by a manager. Each stage below is a question you will meet again in other ServiceNow products and in any serious cloud-governance role:

Stage	The question it answers	Where the skill shows up today
Request	What may this person order, and what must they tell us?	Service catalogue design, variable sets, form behaviour
Placement	Which account and region should the resource land in?	Policy design, landing-zone rules in the cloud provider
Limits	Is this request within the team's quota and budget?	FinOps practice, cost controls, tagging standards
Approval	Who has to say yes, and when can the rule skip them?	Flow Designer approvals, change and request workflows
Build	Which template runs, and what happens after it runs?	Terraform, CloudFormation, ARM, pipeline automation
Record	Does the CMDB know the resource exists, and who owns it?	Discovery, CMDB health, service mapping

Look at the last column and a pattern appears. Half the stages lead straight to platform skills every ServiceNow administrator needs, and the last stage leads to discovery and the CMDB, the data foundation that every operations product depends on. A request that finishes without a clean CMDB record has not really finished, and that sentence was as true for the CPG exam as it is for any ITOM work today.

What no longer transfers?

Be careful with product-specific detail. Screen names, menu paths, the exact profile types and the way catalogue items were generated from templates all belonged to a product that ServiceNow says has evolved into something new. If you studied CPG in depth, keep the concepts and relearn the current screens rather than assuming they still match. The same caution applies to older notes about blueprints, which ServiceNow had already deprecated in favour of cloud templates well before the exam retired.

Which ServiceNow credential should a former CPG candidate take next?

Start from the work you do, not from the retired exam. A former CPG candidate usually falls into one of three groups, and each has a sensible next step.

• You were new to ServiceNow and came to it from the cloud side. The platform itself is your gap. The retired blueprint already recommended the System Administrator learning path, and the ServiceNow Certified System Administrator credential is the usual first proctored certificate for anyone who will configure the platform. It covers the catalogue, forms, workflows, users and data that every cloud request touches.
• You already administer ServiceNow and want to stay close to operations. The record stage of the request is the natural bridge. Discovery is how the platform finds what runs in data centres and clouds and keeps the CMDB accurate, which is exactly where governed provisioning hands over.
• You work for a partner on delivery projects. The two accreditations ServiceNow named are built for you: the Cloud Accelerate Bootcamp Accreditation if your projects are cloud-led, the Enterprise Architecture Delivery Accreditation if they are portfolio- and architecture-led. They are non-proctored and need no maintenance, so they are quick to add alongside a proctored credential.

For the second group, a timed CIS-Discovery practice exam is a quick way to find out how much of your CPG knowledge of accounts, CMDB classes and cloud resources carries across, before you commit to that implementation specialist route.

How should you plan the switch?

Treat it as a short project. Spend the first week reading the current exam or accreditation description in ServiceNow University and marking each topic as known, half known or new. Spend the next weeks only on the new and half-known rows, using a personal developer instance where you can. Finish with timed practice and a review of every wrong answer, sorted into "did not know the term", "chose the wrong component" and "ran out of time". The middle bin is the one that moves results, and it was the CPG candidate's habit of thinking in layers that most often fixed it.

How do you explain the retired credential to an employer?

Lead with the work, not the certificate. A hiring manager will be more interested in what you built with the product than in a credential that ServiceNow no longer lists, so keep a short record of any cloud request flow you designed: the catalogue item, the placement and quota rules, the approval logic and the problem each one solved. That story survives product changes; the credential's status does not need to carry it.

Then put the certificate in context in one line. Say what it was, that ServiceNow retired it in 2025 along with the product it covered, and what you have done since: a current accreditation, a mainline certificate, or delivery work on the products that replaced it. Presented that way, a retired credential reads as early experience with a capability the platform has kept developing, not as a gap.

Finally, be wary of anyone who offers CPG training, exam vouchers or practice material as if the exam were live. ServiceNow's own blueprint page and retirement FAQ are the sources to trust, and both say the same thing: the exam closed on 30 June 2025, and the path forward runs through the newer credentials.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is the ServiceNow CIS-CPG exam retired?

Yes. ServiceNow retired the Certified Implementation Specialist - Cloud Provisioning and Governance exam on 30 June 2025, together with its two on-demand courses. Vouchers can no longer be bought and the exam can no longer be booked or retaken.

Is my CIS-CPG certification still valid?

Your pass still happened, but ServiceNow kept the achievement current in ServiceNow University only until 31 December 2025. After that date it is no longer shown as a current credential, and it does not transfer automatically to any newer accreditation.

Can I keep CIS-CPG on my resume?

Yes. ServiceNow's retirement FAQ says you can keep the certification on your resume if you feel it is valuable. Add the year and note that ServiceNow retired it in 2025, so a reader does not mistake it for a live credential.

What replaced the CIS-CPG certification?

ServiceNow names two successors: the Cloud Accelerate Bootcamp Accreditation and the Enterprise Architecture Delivery Accreditation. Both are accreditations, which are non-proctored and need no maintenance, unlike mainline certifications such as CIS-CPG.

Which ServiceNow certification should I take instead of CIS-CPG?

It depends on your role. People new to the platform usually start with Certified System Administrator, operations specialists often move to Discovery because it keeps the CMDB accurate, and partner delivery staff can add one of the two accreditations ServiceNow named as successors.

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