New Dragos Academy to Strengthen the Industrial Community’s Cybersecurity Skills and Help Close the IT-OT Skills Gap

December 07, 2021 at 13:59 PM EST

Training by World-Class ICS/OT Cyber Experts to Accelerate Time-to-Value for Organizations’ Cybersecurity Investments

Dragos, Inc., the global leader in cybersecurity for industrial controls systems (ICS)/operational technology (OT) environments, today announced Dragos Academy, a new comprehensive educational and training program available to Dragos customers and partners. Dragos Academy aims to strengthen practitioners’ overall ICS/OT cybersecurity skills and help them fully operationalize and accelerate the time-to-value of the Dragos Platform, the most trusted cybersecurity platform for industrial networks providing asset visibility, threat detection, and incident response capabilities.

As organizations recognize the criticality of protecting OT with OT-specific approaches, they are grappling with a cybersecurity skills gap among OT and IT teams. Forty percent of organizations listed training for OT and ICS cybersecurity skills among their top three investment priorities for ICS and OT cybersecurity in 2021, according to a survey of over 17,000 IT, IT security and OT security leaders conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Dragos.

“The Dragos Academy helps close the OT skills gap and lessen the burden of the talent shortage by raising the level of cybersecurity expertise across the ICS/OT community through a curriculum that is continuously developed and updated by the top ICS cybersecurity practitioners in the world,” said Ben Miller, Vice President of Professional Services and R&D at Dragos. “Dragos Academy curriculum will extend far beyond our products and is being developed to cover everything from ICS basics and industrial security best practices to more specialized topics. IT security professionals can expand their knowledge of industrial environments and OT engineers can learn more about securing systems that connect to IT networks.”

The Dragos Academy offers new and expanded on-demand training organized into learning paths, as well as the live, in-person offerings currently available through Dragos training centers, all developed by some of the world’s top ICS cybersecurity practitioners. The online education portal offers engaging content and video on-demand cybersecurity training sessions to help Dragos customers better understand their ICS/OT networks and the industrial-specific security challenges they face, and prepares them to effectively use the Dragos Platform to monitor and protect their environments.

Dragos Academy’s live, hands-on training helps operators and security practitioners improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyber attacks in an ICS/OT environment. These in-person courses cover ICS/OT cybersecurity best practices and industrial security methodologies and technologies. In addition to the classroom component, these state-of-the-art training courses include multiple ICS cyber ranges and individual training stations with functional control system kits for hands-on learning.

“The Dragos Academy is designed to provide an accessible, scalable, and structured way to help practitioners better understand the OT cybersecurity environments they are charged with protecting so they can develop the domain knowledge and critical skills needed to be the most effective at their jobs,” said Miller. “When teams are efficient and effective on the Dragos Platform, they increase the value of their organization’s investment and, most importantly, maximize its security and resiliency.”

The Dragos Academy is available to Dragos customers and geared towards those who utilize the Dragos Platform to monitor and protect critical infrastructure and other industrial environments. The online educational portal and on-demand cybersecurity training is optimized for both desktop and mobile environments so participants can easily incorporate learning into their schedule and progress at their own pace.

Dragos Academy on-demand access is immediately available. To learn more about the Dragos Academy, including the schedule of courses and training center locations in the US, Australia, and Dubai, click here.

About Dragos, Inc.

Dragos has a global mission: to safeguard civilization from those trying to disrupt the industrial infrastructure we depend on every day. The practitioners who founded Dragos were drawn to this mission through decades of government and private sector experience.

Dragos codifies the knowledge of our cybersecurity experts into an integrated software platform that provides customers critical visibility into ICS and OT networks so that threats are identified and can be addressed before they become significant events. Our solutions protect organizations across a range of industries, including power and water utilities, energy, and manufacturing, and are optimized for emerging applications like the Industrial Internet of Things (IIOT).

Dragos is privately held and headquartered in the Baltimore-Washington, DC area with regional presence around the world, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Europe, and the Middle East.