Was there a primary motivator for selecting the SANS Foundations course for your team?
One of the key drivers for selecting the SANS Foundations course was getting access to high quality labs to enhance the learning experience. Practical learning is better for our teams so they get a chance to have hands on learning and not just dealing with hypotheticals from textbooks.
The materials the course offers are also well structured and progress well for our teams with a good spread of materials for beginners and advanced analysts, meaning we were able to offer this course to a wider audience.
Most importantly SANS are highly supportive and approachable allowing our team members to be confident and comfortable in going to SANS for support during their access to the course.
What challenges are you trying to solve with SANS training?
One of the most difficult areas of Cyber security is keeping staff knowledge up to date and applicable to their day-to-day work, whilst offering teams a sense of academic progression.
At Fujitsu, we use a varied range of tools and technologies, with almost all of these being live business environments where experimenting and testing one's skills is not appropriate. The SANS course helped our teams identify gaps in skills and provided a safe place to practically apply those skills without the risk of causing damage to live systems.
Most importantly we are committed to ensuring our team members have access to learning and development opportunities and SANS as a well-respected organisation provided us the means to offer this.
What impacts were these challenges having on your organisation?
Some other vendors provide overly complex courses and expensive exams without proper support to the learners, this can make encouraging our teams to attend training and learning an intimidating experience. Having access to the SANS Foundations courses provided a well-structured and supportive environment to our teams so they could feel comfortable learning and see real opportunities for progression of their skill sets, without being intimidated by the coursework.
Furthermore, the use of well-structured labs meant that skills once learned, were better retained by our teams.
How has the SANS Foundations course benefited your team?
Overall, the main success of this programme has resulted in our analysts building up confidence in their skills and abilities and has unlocked progression barriers by giving them a solid foundation of skills and knowledge to progress up the technical ladder internally. As a result, we have seen more upward progression internally into different technical roles.
Most importantly the course has helped develop a deeper sense of problem solving amongst our team members making us more adaptive and innovative.