In January 2019, Stormshield and the Centre d'Etudes Supérieures Industrielles (CESI) signed a nationwide partnership to provide Stormshield hardware and teacher training. This represents a major new step for the Stormshield Academy and its efforts to expand access to cybersecurity training for future engineers.
On a voluntary basis, all teachers and industry specialists teaching at the CESI may now receive CSNA and CSNE training, which they may then provide to their students.
The CESI and Stormshield: a lasting partnership
Stormshield and the CESI, a group of private industrial engineering schools with 25 campuses in France and 22,000 students per year, have a shared history that goes back several years. Indeed, Stormshield facilities in Villeneuve d’Ascq have long played host to work-study students from the CESI of Arras—even as far back as the Netasq era!
Once they’ve graduated and found employment, some of these former students return to the campus to teach cybersecurity courses. Alejandro Castano was the first of them. Since 2015, this technical specialist has spent 10 days out of the year teaching Linux intro courses and skills development courses to work-study students. “A former colleague gave me the opportunity to teach at the CESI. And since I love sharing knowledge and helping students explore a world they’ve never known before, I decided to take the leap”, he explains. “These courses are very well received by the students, who enjoy the hands-on experience and working closely with the teacher”, adds Rayane Ayate, a Stormshield technical specialist who teaches courses on web services and Linux administration.
The Arras campus: a pioneer in cybersecurity
“The cybersecurity speciality is relatively new to the CESI, but for two years, we’ve offered fifth-year coursework for information system managers specialising in cybersecurity, which provides more in-depth content on this topic. We needed to take our educational and operational content to another level, as it is coming directly from the field”, explains Frédéric Szusciak, a training engineer at the Arras site.
While local proximity played an important role in bringing the CESI and Stormshield together, it was the “opportunity to provide students with superior, French-made hardware” that proved to be the real instigating factor. Appliance handling, installation training, an awareness of functionalities: in order to meet the growing expectations of the cybersecurity market for the 2019 school year, the programme is seeking to beef up the operational side of the curricula for future cybersecurity engineers.
