Well at the end of 2024 I was on a contract job that didn’t get renewed in 2025 so since the New Year rolled over I’ve had time on my hands during the day. I figured I should do something productive. Aside from the staples of cleaning up around the house I thought I’d start heading down paths to help my career. So I did a little digging and came across this certification.
While looking into it I found out it was a free self paced training course with a free exam. Considering I have no income at the moment and need to keep my savings for the keys like mortgage, bills, loan payments, groceries, etc so this was a great find.
To add to the benefits of this I’m admittedly not a firewall guy. When I was working at the healthcare system we had out “Network Engineer 1-3” team, and then we had a “Security team”. The security team handled all the web filtering, most of the firewall maintenance with us Network Engineers doing minimal configuration changes as needed.
When working at the various VAR’s (Value Added Resellers) I’ve worked with it was a similar situation. We had our network infrastructure engineers that handled the route/switch and data center networking projects and consulting. Then we had the security engineers that handled all the various firewall vendor consulting and dedicated wireless engineers.
The Fortinet Certified Associate in Cybersecurity certification run off of a self paced course as I mentioned above. This course was perfect for me. It focuses basic configurations and information around the Fortigate firewall. It was a great intro to understanding the fundamentals of the Fortigate firewall to better understand at a high level what others are talking about. The course is: FCA – FortiGate 7.4 Operator Self-Paced
As quoted from Fortinet themselves the description of the course is:
“In this course, you will learn how to harden the security of your network by using the most common FortiGate features. Through demos and interactive simulations, you will learn how to perform basic operation tasks on FortiGate. You can then build on this knowledge by exploring more advanced topics related to these features.”
It goes over topics at a high level such as Interfaces and Routing, Firewall Policies, Authentication, SSL Inspection, Web Filtering, and more. It takes about a day to get through all the video’s and take the exam.
I found it as a good starting point for someone that hasn’t really had much experience with firewalls and a great way to start year 2025 off with a pick me up motivator. It’s kicked me in the pants to start looking back at everything else I started the last half of 2024 to get going again. I highly recommend it for anyone wanting to get their hands wet with Fortinet/Fortigate and have a achievable win to start out 2025 on a positive note. Here is to the new year and let’s all make it a good one!
