Observations of Instructor Led Training with Real Hardware

TechNow has heard many students talk about virtualized/remote training that TechNow Does Not Do.  While training our most recent offering of PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack a student told his story of how he endend up in our course.  His story we have heard for other technologies like Cisco, VMware, BlueCoat and other products.

A large percentage of training is moving to the virtualized/remote lab environments.  Students are asked to use some variant of remote access software and remote into the training company's lab environment. Our student in our Palo Alto Networks Firewall course informed us that he went to a very costly offering of that course from the vendor and was not able to perform any labs.  There were either network connectivity issues, or issues with the remote access software, or other problems.  The whole training experience was very frustrating and not productive.

We keep our labs open to students if they would like after hours, or before hours access.  Repeatedly going through a lab engrains that knowledge for later recall.  Touching hardware is so critical in understanding the problems that arise when a cable comes loose, or a cable gets plugged in the wrong port.  There are other scenarios such as just pulling the power cable, or turning off a power strip, or accidently overwriting a configuration.  These disaster scenarious requires hands-on physical access to hardware.  Preventing and recovering from disasters is what it's all about, and that requires hands-on, instructor led, real hardware.

TN-413: Certified AI Program Manager (C|AIPM)

Certified AI Program Manager (CAIPM) is EC-Council’s professional certification for people responsible for owning AI decisions and driving execution: business, technology, data, and risk.

The Certified AI Program Manager (CAIPM) Course equips you with hands-on expertise across the full spectrum of AI tools, from conversational AI and image generation to code assistants and audio synthesis.

Participants will learn how to evaluate, deploy, and integrate AI tools into enterprise workflows, understanding not just how they work, but how to leverage them for maximum business impact. This course covers how to assess AI readiness across teams and processes, Prioritize AI use cases tied to business outcomes, Design adoption and rollout roadmaps , Coordinate delivery across cross-functional teams, implement governance, Responsible AI, and security controls , and how to track performance and ROI to prove value

By the end of the course, learners will be well-prepared to take the Certified AI Program Manager (CAIPM) exam and demonstrate the ability to own AI initiatives end to end , validate mastery of decision framing and trade-off analysis for AI initiatives and Apply governance, ethics, and risk management principles across the AI lifecycle.

Course Objectives:

•MLOps Principles: Model life cycle management for scalable, production-ready AI
•Use Case Evaluation: ROI-driven assessment and prioritization of AI initiatives
•AI Strategy Frameworks: Enterprise AI roadmapping, portfolio planning, and value prioritization
•AI Investment Justification: Quantifying AI value, ROI, and mission impact for funding decisions
•Change Management: Workforce enablement and stakeholder alignment
•KPI Development: AI metrics, success indicators, and executive dashboards
•AI Governance: Risk, ethics, compliance, and responsible AI principles
•Vendor Evaluation: AI platform and tool selection aligned with enterprise needs

Dates/Locations:

No Events

Prerequisites: Familiarity with generative AI concepts, prompt engineering fundamentals, and AI workflows will help you succeed. 

 

 

Virtualization/Cloud

TechNow has been involved in enterprise client server architectures since 1990.  TechNow has delivered  national and international implementations for Valero, Wholefoods, Quest, USAA, Golfsmith, AMD, Motorola, and many other fortune 1000 corporations, 

TechNow's training program has followed the evolution of enterprise computing into virtualization and cloud computing. With a focus on security, TechNow can present the ramifications of many centralized strategies.  All courses utilize enterprise instructors with experience and can discuss the detail of implementation and the integration into an existing infrastructure.

in   

Palo Alto Networks Firewall Training Course Lab

Working with the TechNow lab for the PA-215: Palo Alto Networks Firewall Essentials FastTrack course has been nothing less than a techie's idea of fun.  When students come in we are immediatly configuring the Cisco 3750 switches for access ports, VLANS, and trunks.  We then cable the switch to the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.  Each student gets their own Palo Alto Firewall Pod of hardware and software.  What we find as fun is the VLAN environment, with an array of virtual machines hosted on an ESXi server that can really exercise the abilities of the Palo Alto Firewall.  The DMZ VLAN hosts virtual machines that support enterprise services and also potentialy vulnerable web services.  The Trust VLAN has Windows and Linux clients.  The UnTrust VLAN has Web services and a VM of Kali. The hardware Firewall is additionally connected to a Management VLAN.  All those VLANs are trunked into an ESXi server where the student also has a VM-Series Palo Alto Networks Firewall for High Availability.  

After configuring all the trunking, VLANs, and network interfaces we learn about the firewall and configure it for the lab environment.  Using Metasploitable and Kali/Metasploit nefarious penetration attempts are executed.  Using packet captures, custom APP-ID's  and custom signatures are generated.  Custom logging and reporting are created to similate and enterprise and assist the desired Incident Response.  It is always fun in a training environment to learn all about the controls available in a product, even though specific controls may not be used in the operational environment.  In the end we have a good understanding of the Palo Alto Networks Firewall.