Custom Cisco ASA and Cisco NAC workshop for UK service Provider

ProNetExpert was asked to provide customised training for the SSL VPN Feature of the Cisco ASA5500 series Firewall appliance in tandem with the Cisco Clean Access Solution for NAC (Network Admission Control).

The customer, a major worldwide service provider with in excess of £3.6 billion revenue, was introducing a new offering for its customers - Managed SSL VPN service through a wireless partner with the additional level of security provided by Cisco Clean Access as NAC Solution (Network Admission Control Clean). The design was built by experienced engineers in close cooperation with Cisco, and it provided a turnkey solution for the clients of the customer enterprise. However, the challenge was the operation of this network, especially due to the fact that both technologies were brand new (SSL VPN and NAC) and the operations staff had no expertise in this area. Of course it was clear to our customer that this new solution – which was unique in the marketplace – could only be a success if it was maintained correctly.

The customer had the choice to send his team (approximately 36 employees from the operations team – working in shifts) to several different standard courses. This would have required a significant amount of time and money (SNPA course for ASA5500 series 5 days, CANAC for Cisco Clean Access 3 days – all for 3 deliverables as not all employees could attend at the same time). On top of that – due to the nature of the courses (being more general) they didn’t focus on the specialities of our customers implementation (the combination of the ASA5500 series and the Cisco NAC).

Therefore, ProNetExpert visited the customer site in an effort to gain a greater understanding of the business concept of the new service offering, the design and the implementation as well as special requirements and workarounds that have been identified by the customers design team. Based on this information, ProNetExpert then produced a custom workshop for 3 days including a specific lab that reflected the customers real environment. This workshop was held 3 times in order to meet the customers organizational constraints (not all employees could attend at the same time due to daily operation commitments).

Our customer expressed great satisfaction with the results, and even though the students weren’t able to learn about all the features of the Cisco ASA5500 series (like site-to-site VPN, transparent mode or contexts), they knew how the ASA was used in their network in great detail (and of course the same applied to the NAC solution).