SANS Institute, the global leader in cybersecurity training, 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.

"With the work at home and remote working actions across the UAE, Saudi Arabia and other Middle East countries, we are seeing accelerated journey into the mainstream choice of the public cloud, which is being used for collaborative meetings, education, healthcare, online buying, citizen services amongst others.

With this huge improve of the local public cloud, often from unsecured connections and networks, the number of phishing malware and threat heavy activity has also vigorously picked up.

We believe the availability of online cloud security training and certification courses from SANS Institute will go a long way in helping to counter these blind spots and increase the level of suitable skills" explains Ned Baltagi, Managing Director, Middle East

"Africa at SANS Institute. In April this year, IDC stated more than 25% of enterprises in Saudi Arabia have plans to expand a mix of on-premises and dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet base 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.

"To ensure that regional cloud and security professionals can make good use of SANS cloud security training courses, they have been segregated by job roles and competency levels.

The curriculum provides immersion instruction designed to assist students to master practical steps for maintaining systems and relationships in the cloud against critical threats.

The curriculum has been produced through a consensus process involving industry engineers, architects, administrators, developers, and security managers.

The courses are suitable for public cloud, multi-cloud, and hybrid-cloud scenarios for enterprises and developing organizations," added Baltagi.