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SANS Institute Introduces Cloud Security Training Courses in the Middle East
September 2020 by Marc Jacob
SANS Institute announced the availability of cloud security and certification training courses for the region. The GCC region is witnessing a brisk pace of cloud adoption due to the ongoing work from home initiatives by the government and private sector. Coupled with this adoption of public cloud, there is a need to increase skills around cloud security as well. SANS’ cloud security curriculum focuses its resources on the growing threats into the cloud by providing training, certification, research, and community initiatives to help security professionals.
In April this year, IDC stated more than 25% of enterprises in Saudi Arabia have plans to deploy a mix of on-premises and dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet infrastructure needs. According to these latest findings revealed by IDC’s annual Saudi Arabia CIO Survey, there are three main obstacles to cloud roll-outs in Saudi Arabia. Insufficient migration capabilities, multi-cloud management challenges, and security concerns. The use of legacy applications and infrastructure, lack of skills, and difficulties finding the right partners were also identified as key issues.
IDC anticipates an increase in security spending as enforced working-from-home practices expose corporate networks and computing devices to new levels of cyber security risk. IDC believes the fallout from the COVID-19 outbreak will expose new security loopholes that cyber miscreants will exploit. As a result, data breaches are expected to become more widespread, exacerbated by the notoriously unsecure habits of remote workers. Securing the cloud workloads used to perform work-related tasks has become extremely important and a failure to do so poses a significant threat to the organization – operationally, financially, and reputationally.
A typical public cloud platform is built from applications, code and automation. SANS Institute believes that the cloud is a transformative technology that will define technology landscape for many years to come. The cloud security training courses in 2020, have been designed to add skills to various job roles that support usage of the cloud by enterprises. They have been designed to boost skills of Cloud Security Manager, Cloud Security Architecture, Cloud Security Engineer, Cloud Security Analyst, and the DevOps Professional. SANS cloud security courses are also segregated by competency levels and are classified as Baseline, Foundational, Core and Specialization.
