Online, Self-paced Training Courses Previously Open to Partners for Free Now Also Available for Anyone to Expand Technical Security Skills and Broad Cyber Awareness At No Cost

“In the wake of the global health crisis, organizations in the region had to make a rapid shift to accommodate their remote working models. As a result, businesses face several challenges but key among them is dealing with new security risks targeting remote workers,” said Alain Penel, Regional Vice President – Middle East, Fortinet. “IT teams are under pressure to secure not only the organization’s network, but also a remote workforce, and this requires a broad and varied skill set. To help our partners and customers in the Middle East region update and gain new skillsets in this time of crisis, we are making our entire online, self-paced catalogue of advanced training courses available for free so that any IT professional can expand timely knowledge and skills on-demand as needed to effectively protect their organizations.”

Increased Risk With Distributed Workforces

Globally, organizations have had to quickly adapt their network to support their workforce transitioning from their traditional on-premises work environment to remote telework. To maintain business continuity, IT teams are strained with ensuring everyone in their organization is securely set up to remotely access critical resources and applications on the corporate network. In parallel, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the unprecedented increase in remote access of sensitive information and data by searching for security gaps and shifting attack strategies to target teleworker environments.

 According to a recent study from ISC2, nearly two-thirds of companies lacked the skilled staff they needed to maintain effective security operations. With the rapidly expanding attack surface that a distributed workforce at scale has introduced, IT teams need broad security skillsets more than ever, to protect their organizations.

Free Training to Help Develop Timely Security Skills

Fortinet is leveraging curriculum from its NSE Institute’s training and certification program to offer 24 advanced security courses for free to help IT professionals expand their cybersecurity knowledge and address new risks.

By learning about Fortinet technologies, such as FortiGate firewalls, FortiNAC and FortiManager, training participants will acquire an array of skills to defend any network against threats. Recorded lab demos for these courses will be available for on-demand viewing and supplemented with regularly scheduled live sessions with Fortinet Certified Trainers. During these live sessions, trainers will be available to demo labs and conduct Q&A sessions. Anyone interested in getting started with Fortinet’s free training courses can visit here.  

 For anyone interested in training options beyond self-paced, Fortinet has a worldwide network of Authorized Training Centers (ATCs) providing Fortinet training in a variety of formats.

NSE Institute’s History of Addressing the Cybersecurity Skills Gap

Today’s introduction of additional free cybersecurity courses further builds on Fortinet’s existing efforts to address the cyber skills gap through training and education. With over 300,000 NSE certifications issued, Fortinet established the NSE Institute in 2015, comprised of the NSE training and certification program, the Fortinet Network Security Academy, and the Fortinet Veterans program. In addition, Fortinet was named “Professional Certification Program of the Year” by the 2019 CyberSecurity Breakthrough Awards.

As part of the program’s free training catalogue, Fortinet provides foundational cyber awareness courses for anyone through levels NSE 1 and NSE 2. In addition, the FortiGate Essentials training was recently added as an additional course for anyone interested in learning how to use firewall policies, user authentication, routing and SSL VPN.

Securing the Expanding Attack Surface Beyond Free Training

Fortinet is committed to customers and partners not just through free trainings but also through existing functionalities embedded in Fortinet FortiGate firewalls. For example, existing Fortinet customers already have remote worker solutions embedded in their FortiGate firewalls that can be used at no additional charge. Powered by custom security processors (SPUs), FortiGates are capable of scaling to a significantly higher capacity. Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution is included in every FortiGate appliance, providing customers reliable and cost-effective connectivity for their branch workers, improving their application performance. And Fortinet’s free FortiClient software can be quickly installed on both business and personal devices to create encrypted VPN connections to the enterprise network.