Team we45
April 7, 2020

How 2020 changed AppSec Skilling

2020 has been quite a year already the world over.

We began with the unfortunate Australia wildfire, which was the first incident in what now seems like the age of the 10 plagues. A pandemic is sweeping across the world, and everyone is socially distancing. But hey, no use panicking during a pandemic, is there?

Just like every other company out there, we at we45 had big plans for this year. But when the global pandemic hit, we as the rest of the world were anxious. The one thing we knew, however, was that we had to try to help in whatever way we could.

However, when we looked at how we could make this downtime more productive for ourselves as human beings outside of work, we saw that in such times of uncertainty, professionals need to focus on two critical aspects of self development: learning and adaptation. Those who adapt, survive. With teams working remotely to be at their productive best, product engineering professionals have realized that this is also the best time for them to focus on themselves - through skill development.

Incidentally, the need to make our training programs accessible to a wider audience especially for those with cross-geographical teams was always in our back-burner. We kind of saw the need to have a robust remote learning platform, and this was in the works as early as September 2019, but the question was how fast we’d be able to get it up and running, and if we should focus on it as a core offering. But as we entered February, we went all out and put it together.

Introducing AppSecEngineer - we45’s Training and Cloud Labs platform

AppSecEngineer is really nothing but a convergence of two critical aspects of our programs that have singularly been responsible for taking our training programs to conferences across the globe and amongst product engineering teams - Content and Labs ; designed to scale. The platform allows the we45 trainers to integrate elements of training, hands-on lab configurations, examination and certification across all of our training programs. The AppSecEngineer platform will also be used to deliver our upcoming on-demand training programs. This would now allow us to deliver our programs to a much wider audience virtually, yet maintaining the experience and essence of our classroom based programs..

What makes our virtual training different?

Well, for one, it’s designed to give you practical, hands-on training and skills needed in the Application Security space. Another key difference is that it’s built from our lived experience in defending different applications and training different companies' development and security teams.

Over the last 7 years, we’ve conducted many technical security training programs, and have trained task forces from Fortune 1000 companies. We’ve presented our research and insights at events like BlackHat, DEF CON, OWASP AppSec, and CodeBlue. And based on our experience, we'd also built cloud labs that allow them to practically test their skills from anywhere. Our state-of-the-art cloud labs are lighter than virtual machines, and can even run on an iPad, so there’s no need for you to even have a heavy duty machine to run them. Also, about 75% of each of our courses are hands-on, which comes in handy especially for engineers in the Application Security space.

What helped us release this for individuals and groups, was the changes we'd made to our cloud labs before the pandemic broke out

In times of uncertainty, the only thing that helps us survive is adaptability. Learning. Upskilling.Training.

And that's what we're offering you.

Train with the best, in whatever area in product security you'd like. Come out stronger, more experienced. Certified. Practical. Experienced. Our remote training calendar for April, May and June is up now.

If you'd like to know more about our Virtual Training Classroom and the classes offered, here's a word from Abhay Bhargav - we45's Chief Technology Officer