Despite the deep worldwide crisis some IT branches are booming and showing unexpectedly quick development. These are for example wireless, mobile and security markets. After years of cosmetically changes in Check Point flagship product VPN-1 a new fresh wind seems to be blowing.

Check Point has declared that the courses will be just now numbered by year of publication rather than relying on software version number. Currently two new courses have been brought to the market and these are Check Point Security Administration 2013 and Check Point Security Engineering 2013. The first one is already delivered while the other is expected to be available pretty soon. Both courses are based Check Point R76 software release. Let us have a short glance at what are the changes and what are motivations for those changes.

Starting from the beginning Check Point has unified SPLAT and formerly Nokia IPSO platform into one operating system GAiA. Such things like user friendly GUI, ease of configuration backup have been expected. After adding CPU scalability by CoreXL and processing speed by new “3X” appliances hardware the scalability of the operating system was lagging. GAiA adds silently the support for 64-bit architecture allowing users to process large number of simultaneous connections. Technologies like Application Control and IPS have now chance to work effectively as the underlying system is able to give them enough power and memory.

The other changes are also important. Due to the fact that cracking of cryptographic algorithms on graphical processors is proven to cost effective and fast has caused a small revolution. The National Security Agency as part of its Cryptographic Modernization Program has introduced Suite B that is set of cryptographic algorithms increasing the data security. These changes have been already deployed in R71 but just now a part of reliable software. It is worthwhile to inspect VPN encryption properties in the new software and adjust settings to your security policy requirements.

The GUI this time has also undergone major changes. New things like rule hit counters, graphical presentation of activities in different configuration tabs gives the administrators unique chance to understand the network traffic and optimize the software performance already on the level of Smart Dashboard.

Since CCSA 2013 apart from a study guide there is a practice test freely available on Check Point web pages. This helps quite a lot in exam preparation. It is worthwhile to mention that exam question pools are pretty big.

It is for sure worthwhile to take a closer look on GAiA and new CCSA/CCSE 2013 courses. Especially the last one includes quite some information on debugging and troubleshooting Check Point products. This information was missing since the disappearance of CCSE+ course. Clustering with VRRP is also a new thing introduced with IPSO unification. These are only some the highlights of CCSA/CCSE 2013 courses and Check Point features. We will be pleased to answer any questions pertaining to Check Point courses. Basic information could be found on our web pages.