eSafe Certified Professional

HISTORICAL NOTE Aladdin was an Israeli company known for its security eTokens and mail filtering appliances - eSafe. In 2009 it was bought by Safenet primarily for the token/DRM line, and soon the eSafe appliance was discontinued. Later the Safenet was in turn acquired by Gemalto. You can read about Aladdin at Aladdin Wiki
Recently I've taken the 2-day course and then successfully passed eSCP certification and here are some impressions about that. First, the main question - what is the gain here? - I will frankly say - I don't know. This cert isn't found under 'most wanted/hot/industry leading' headings anywhere, so whether it's gonna get you an advantage in promotion/job search/etc remains an open question. The course was fully funded by my work and I took part in it for the benfit of the knowledge I would gain there only.The certification exam is available only after you've passed the course.
The course was administered at 3rd-part learning center but by folks from Aladdin itself ONLY - one of the strong points of the course. As I understood even if the course was given in the heart of Amazonia, Brazil it still would be presented by Aladdin folks, no 'certified instructors' are employed. There were 2 instructors . While the first instructor was from the Presale team Liat Ivri, she could answer any technical questions I had ("- Can you remind me name of the file to add Ip address to the interface so it survives reboot, unlike ifconfig ?").

The overall course was approximately 20% presentations/talks and 80% hands-on labs. The contents can be seen here, only that we dealt with version 7 only, not 6.2 as in pdf: ftp://ftp.aladdin.com/pub/marketing/eSafe/Agenda/Expert_Agenda.pdf . Every pair of students was given Hellgate appliance to play with. And we used it to the full - our team even succeeded to push beyond the limit,crash and do RMA on our HellGate - fastest RMA ever seen - took 5 mins to bring new Hellgate.

Everyone was given a book-sized course material including presentations we heard and labs. The flow was - presentation then lab. Started with reimaging eSafe from usb, then all config labs as per pdf above. The LDAP lab took much more then was allocated for it as many (including me) are not good friends with all the AD/LDAP/OU/CN/DN stuff ,eventhough the AD server was preconfigured and we had to just(?) connect eSafe to it. Due to time shortage we haven't done Web SSL/Reporter/Proxy (not a big deal for me as I am yet to see any of them in the wild) labs.
All setup had access to the Internet , so URL-filtering we could test real-time.
To conclude - I enjoyed the course, learned lots of new things (my job involves supporting already installed and working eSafe, so I don't do installing/configuring from scratch the appliance, something our integration department always do) and therefore it was worthwhile. Upon completion we were given link to the password-protected CBT, possibility to open personal account with portal.aladdin.com , link to download eSafe 7.1 ISO disk (every eSafe has built-in evaluation license for 30 days), nice bag, and user/pass and link to the website to take exam.
Now to exam - it was a web based test, with 50 questions and 90 minutes to do it. The test is pretty easy given you took active part in the course before as it recaptures the same topics. So I did it in about 30 mins, got the web page "Congradulations you passed" and a week later received by a courier framed certificate that I am now eSafe Certified Professional.

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