Some are too keen to call time on classroom-based upskilling. Pointing to its reliance on antiquated concepts such as real rooms and - god forbid - real people, they see a legacy approach which should soon disappear into a cloud.
We take a different view. Classroom based training such as SANS and CompTIA have a good reputation for a reason. Defensive teams get an unquestionably deep learning experience in a room with talented instructors. They also get a huge amount out of interacting with peers.
Our new platform was built to enhance, not replace, classroom upskilling by fixing a number of gaps.
Complimentary. Not conflicting
Before class, your attendee doesn't always have a firm grasp of the fundamental concepts being taught. More focussed on tooling, and with precious little time, modern cybersecurity talent’s ability to understand foundational technologies is limited. With hundreds of SANS and CompTIA mapped skills courses, we fix this gap so your people are ready to make the most of their courses.
In an ideal world, you send multiple team members to SANS classes. In the real world, budgets don’t stretch to this - leaving defensive teams short when, for example, your newly-skilled cloud security specialist is on holiday during an attack abusing AWS. With our new platform, this is less of a problem. With labs mapped to SANS and CompTIA, you get strength in depth by spreading skills across multiple team members.
Classroom training can lack realism. Most providers use open-source tools - not mainstream vendors - and trainees don’t get to apply skills against live incidents in full environments. Using new skills for the first time in a real attack creates risk.
Our cloud range allows classroom leaners to practice using their new capabilities, against real attacks, with mainstream tools. As a result, newly developed skills embed and knowledge cascades across the entire team.
Finally, while you innately know the value of the lessons your team are attending, how do you understand the resultant impact on risk? Just as importantly, are you able to report this upwards to justify spending? Being able to map skills to risk, role and threats - we help you track ROI. Our platform even measures the impact on SOC metrics such as detection and response times.
Ultimately, classroom upskilling has too much unique value as a concept to simply be ‘innovated away’ by a platform. It can, however, be improved. With minimal resources, our platform allows organizations to build deeper, more relevant, teams while also measuring their impact.
For more detail, see the use case on SANS Sec 488 below