As time goes on, having worked for Red Education for coming up to 7 years, it’s been great to see the evolution of the courses that are offered in Red Education’s portfolio.
In particular the new Palo Alto Networks Firewall 8.0 Essentials: Configuration and Management (210) course. This is a brand new 5-day course that has been built from Palo Alto Networks existing 201, 205 and 231 courses. I’ve run these courses individually for a number of years, and it’s been great seeing a vendor actively improve their courses through each iteration of material. This latest change, however, tackles some issues that were inherited with the course layouts themselves. Each course as a stand-alone, in my honest opinion, was awesome. The 201 helps newcomers get started with the (admittedly very different) firewall technology, setting a solid foundation. The 205 extends this knowledge giving practical applications for the concepts covered in the 201. Finally, the 231 would then take that knowledge, and give real world examples of threats and how to use the Palo Alto Networks Platform to combat them. A common concern however, is that there was always an overlap for students who wanted the whole gamut. It’s an unfortunate by-product of having individual courses.
Late last year, Red Education was lucky enough to be invited to Palo Alto Networks Tech Fest, where their internal instructors, as well 8 Elite external instructors (myself included) got together to discuss the ins and outs of the technology as well as the methods of instruction and “tricks of the trade” if you will. During my time there, the new course was discussed, and I had the opportunity to meet the course development team. It was great to see the level of professionalism and structure they had in place to ensure that any issues with current courses were being addressed. The level of interaction with instructors, that was encouraged for new content creation, was plausible. What this boils down to is that, as new content and courses get released, we can have faith that they will ALWAYS improve. This new course is a product of that methodology.
When our experienced instructors at Red Education run instructor-led training, we often have a tendency of taking students off the beaten path by performing live demos, or bringing in real world examples of situations that the course material often fails to adequately express. Unfortunately (for me) a lot of the demos I have found myself performing during the 201 and 205 classes are now included in the 210 courseware itself!
So what is the new 210 course?
Well, to put it shortly, it’s a 5-day course, built from 7 days worth of course content. By combining 3 separate courses into 1 concise block, the previously mentioned issue of overlapping concepts is a thing of the past. Students are now able to attend a 1 week course, and leave with not only a solid foundation around the Palo Alto Networks Platform, but will also be armed with real world examples of malicious traffic, enabling them to be capable of combating them when they return.
Some would say this is a revolution of the courses Palo Alto Networks offers, as opposed to an evolution. I’ll leave that up to you! See you next training.
Written by Ronen Meshel
You can read more about Ronen on his website: ronen.it/