Cybersecurity awareness remains one of the most important security hurdles facing organizations today as threats still grow more sophisticated and commonplace. In fact, consistent with the newest FortiGuard Labs Global Threat Landscape Report, the number of ransomware attacks in December 2020 was seven times the amount reported in July 2020. This increase in attacks combined with the cybersecurity skills gap creates an ideal storm for cybercriminals.
To quell this storm, organizations should search for ways to market cyber awareness in their organizations, starting with cybersecurity training offerings. Fortinet’s NSE Training Institute and Training Advancement Agenda (TAA) helps educate individuals to improve their career opportunities and help close the cybersecurity skills gap by developing career pathways for security professionals, students, veterans, military spouses, and more through the safety Academy Program, Certification Program and Veterans Program.
The Fortinet NSE (Network Security Expert) Certification Program, for instance, is an eight-level training and certification program designed to reinforce skillsets across a good array of issues. Driving cybersecurity awareness through the Fortinet NSE Certification Program enables companies to make sure that each one employee – from the non-technical to the IT administrative level – has the talents they need to keep enterprise networks secure.
How to Drive Cybersecurity Awareness
Level 1: Information Security Awareness
The Fortinet NSE 1 level offers training for anyone of any background who wants to learn about the cybersecurity threat landscape. It includes thirty-three self-paced activities that address real-life cyber threats. This course provides the foundation for the rest of the modules, including basic terms and concepts.
Level 2: The Evolution of Cybersecurity
Also designed to market general cybersecurity awareness, Fortinet NSE 2 builds on the previous lesson. Consisting of thirteen self-paced activities, Fortinet NSE 2 delves into the types of security solutions that vendors have developed to address the cybercrime problems organizations and individuals face. Additionally, this course acts as the foundation for learning how the Fortinet Security Fabric elements work together for a broad, integrated, automated approach to mitigating continuously evolving risks.
Level 3: Fortinet Core Products
Fortinet designed Fortinet NSE 3, to supply participants with a basic, contextual understanding of the products. It focuses on key features and maps them to specific network security problems.
Level 4: Network Security Professional
Fortinet NSE 4 offers a more technical approach, making it appropriate for network and security professionals who configure, monitor, and operate FortiGate devices on a day-to-day basis. To be certified at this level, users must complete both the FortiGate Security and FortiGate Infrastructure course exams. Each two-day interactive course includes training and lab hours.
- FortiGate Security: This course includes hands-on activities around firewall policies, the Security Fabric, user authentication, and SSL VPN. Additional administrative fundamentals include using security profiles like IPS, antivirus, web filtering, and application control.
- FortiGate Infrastructure: This course offers activities centered on advanced topics around FortiGate networking and security. These often include features applied in a complex or larger enterprise or MSSP networks, like advanced routing, transparent mode, redundant infrastructure, site-to-site IPsec VPN, single sign-on (SSO), web proxy, and diagnostics.
Level 5: Network Security Analyst
Fortinet NSE 5 is meant for network and security professionals who require the expertise to centrally manage, analyze, and report on Fortinet security devices. To pass this level, participants must successfully pass exams for a minimum of two of the subsequent five courses.
- FortiEDR: during this course, which features twenty-four self-paced activities, attendees find out how to guard endpoints by leveraging real-time orchestrated incident response.
- FortiManager: This course is compiled of seventeen self-paced exercises focused on the fundamentals of centralizing network administration. Further, hands-on labs incorporate deployment strategies like single or multiple ADOMs, device registration, policy packages, shared objects, installing configuration changes, provisioning FortiManager as an area FortiGuard distribution server, and troubleshooting.
- FortiAnalyzer: This one-day class, which features twenty self-paced activities, provides training and hands-on lab hours focused on the basics for centralized logging and reporting. Participants learn how to configure and deploy FortiAnalyzerwhile also identifying threats and attack patterns through logging, analysis, and reporting. The lab activities explore administration and management, registering devices for log collection, central log collection, forensic log analysis based on simulated network attacks, report creation, and common misconfiguration issues.
- FortiClient EMS: during this course, attendees find out how to use and provision FortiClient with FortiClient EMS. Incorporating twelve self-paced activities, the course also includes an interactive lab component centered on administration fundamentals like installation, management, operation modes, deployment, implementation, and management for endpoint security.
- FortiSIEM: This three-day course focuses on using and integrating FortiSIEM into network awareness. It discusses initial configurations, architecture, device discovery, collecting performance information, aggregating with Syslog data, and using the configuration database.
Level 6: Network Security Specialist
Another technical certification for network and security professionals, Fortinet NSE 6 delves into the safety Fabric line. Certification requires successfully passing four of the seven available course exams.
- FortiADC: This one-day interactive course covers the configuration and administration of FortiADC with fourteen self-paced activities. The lab portion provides hands-on experience with administrative fundamentals, including Layer 4 and Layer 7 server load balancing, link load balancing, global load balancing, high availability (HA), firewall policies, and advanced routing.
- FortiAuthenticator: During this course, attendees find out how FortiAuthenticator can help them manage secure authentication and identity management. As a part of learning the way to configure and deploy the answer, attendees also find out how to use FortiAuthenticator for certificate management, two-factor authentication (2FA), LDAP, and RADIUS server user authentication, and SAML Single-Sign-On (SSO). The labs provide experience around how FortiAuthenticator can extend Fortinet SSO and shows how the answer can act as a certificate authority (CA) and logon event collector. Additionally, it covers portal services, FortiTokens, and digital certificates.
- FortiMail: This course offers strategies for shielding networks from email threats and integrating with FortiSandbox. The labs explore FortiMail’s role in extending FortiGate email filtering capabilities for enhanced security. It also addresses the e-mail security challenges that tiny business email administrators and carriers face when deploying, managing, and troubleshooting FortiMail.
- FortiWeb: This Fortinet NSE 6 course focuses on deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting Fortinet web application firewalls (WAFs). It covers key web application security concepts and includes labs featuring traffic and attack simulations using real web applications. Participants will then work with these simulations to realize experience around distributing load from virtual servers to real servers while enforcing logical parameters, inspecting flow, and securing HTTP session cookies.
- FortiNAC: During this course, attendees learn best practices for using FortiNAC. Additionally, the lab portion provides hands-on experience with fundamental administrative tasks that implement network visibility and security automation for better control.
- FortiVoice: With twenty-five self-paced activities, this course centers on FortiVoice configurations for phones, exploring the way to found out profiles, extensions, trunk configurations, and call features.
- Integrated and Cloud Wireless: With eleven self-paced activities, this course focuses on deploying, configuring, and troubleshooting secure wireless LAN using an integrated wireless solution. Attendees learn RF concepts and best practices for wireless LAN, device configuration, security setting, and troubleshooting. The interactive labs reinforce skills around deploying and centrally managing a wireless LAN.
Level 7: Network Security Architect
Network and security professionals involved in designing, architecting, administrating, and supporting security infrastructures are encouraged to realize Fortinet NSE 7 certification in one or more of the subsequent six technology areas.
- OT Security: The thirteen self-paced activities during this course provide information about securing an Operational Technology (OT) infrastructure by designing, deploying, administrating, and monitoring FortiGate, FortiNAC, FortiAnalyzer, and FortiSIEM.
- Advanced Analytics: This course focuses on the way to optimize FortiSIEM deployments. It includes adding various organizations, discovering devices, differentiating logs and events from multiple organizations, and setting appropriate rules. Additionally, it takes a deep dive into different clear conditions, baseline calculating, and remediation methods. Attendees get hands-on experience with configuring a cluster, adding organizations to FortiSIEM, managing scope, registering collectors, registered Linux and Windows agents, and analyzing events triggered from built-in rules.
- Advanced Threat Protection: This NSE 7 course focuses on protecting organizations and improving security against advanced threats. It includes using FortiSandbox for threat detection and understanding local threat intelligence. It also provides information on the way to leverage the suite of services to make end-to-end threat protection.
- Public Cloud Security: This course covers different public cloud provider infrastructures, including security challenges like high availability (HA), auto-scaling, software-defined network (SDN) connectors, and managing cloud traffic.
- Enterprise Firewall: This course, which incorporates training and hands-on labs, focuses on implementing, troubleshooting, and centrally managing enterprise security infrastructure using multiple FortiGate devices.
- SD-WAN: Covering common SD-WAN deployment scenarios, this course looks at different situations, including single enterprise and multiple data center environments to enhance and troubleshoot deployments.
- Secure Access: Bringing together FortiGate, FortiAP, FortiSwitch, and FortiAuthenticator capabilities, this course educates attendees around securing wired and wireless networks. It covers the way to provision, administer, and monitor FortiAP and FortiSwitch using FortiManager. It also explores the deployment, integration, and troubleshooting of Fortinet solutions to reinforce network security, also as the way to quarantine risky and compromised devices automatically.
Level 8: Network Security Expert
A culmination of all the opposite certifications, Fortinet NSE 8 is meant for networking and security experts. The technical certification includes a proctored written exam and a practical exam. A two-day immersion self-paced lab session is often taken to organize for the sensible exam after a private pass the written portion.
Building Cybersecurity Awareness
Awareness is that the foundation upon which organizations build a strong cybersecurity program. Although many organizations specialize in daily end-user cyber awareness training, they ought to also consider the worth of coaching their security and network professionals. To maximize investments and enhance cybersecurity, cyber awareness training should make sure that technical security professionals gain the knowledge required to optimize solutions deployments for enhanced security. By taking steps to prioritize cybersecurity awareness training, like what's offered through the Fortinet NSE Certification Program and TAA, organizations and individuals alike can get before threats before they will make an impression.
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