To start off with I wanted to stress that the following article is based on my own experience and is my own opinion, and not that of anyone else including my employer or Fortinet. The aim of the article is to provide some context for the XPERTS Summit and the Ultimate Fabric Challenge for those who haven’t been before, and what makes them special.

The Fortinet XPERTS summit is Fortinet’s signature training event aimed at highly NSE certified and skilled partner engineers. It is a series of regional events with a focus on technical audiences who are skilled in cybersecurity.  The summit generally starts with a plenary session where senior executives present to the attendees on the company’s technical direction and upcoming innovations, and then each day following that is broken into 2 x 4 hour technical deep dive sessions on selected topics.

The technical deep dives start with a (hopefully) short technical presentation where the CSE or Product Manager presents on the technical capabilities that are going to be highlighted by the following lab, and what business outcomes these support. I added the “hopefully” qualifier as unfortunately in my experience not all product managers / CSE’s got that memo and their presentations leak into the lab time – which is the most important part for the target audience.

A good example of the presentations and labs on offer is the Fabric Solutions Lab by Consulting Systems Engineer (CSE) Chris Eddisford. Chris’s remit is to advise and focus on the integration of Fortinet products, and as such his labs show the true power of the Fortinet Security Fabric. The Fabric Solutions Lab has more than 10 separate Fortinet products within it, and runs through a number of Attack and Defense scenarios which first has you perform attacks against virtual infrastructure, then implement controls using linked Fortinet products, and then re-run those attacks. This lab in particular shows the automated outcomes that can be achieved within the Fortinet product stack and can help show engineers the value proposition for these solutions. And since these labs are real images deployed onto virtualized hardware, the configurations that are developed and implemented as part of the lab can be put to good effect on real world implementations as well and the experience is equivalent to having deployed the product in a real world scenario.

And therein lies the real benefit of the XPERTS summit – these labs inspire questions and ideas, which can then be bounced off the highly skilled CSE’s in real-time or against your peers in the room. It’s also an opportunity for the Fortinet Product Managers, as the questions may lead to them finding a customer requirement that they didn’t know they had, enabling new features to be developed that really matter to the customer. These connections pay dividends long after the summit with the networking opportunities opening doors for engineers to other highly skilled peers or resources within Fortinet, and for Fortinet to identify a highly skilled user group that ideas and features can be run by if required.

XPERTs summits are some of the most technically packed training events that I have ever been to, and you finish the day mentally exhausted but having learnt a lot. However the technical sessions are not the most valuable part of the summit in my opinion, especially if you aspire to achieve the FCX – the most valuable part of the summit for that goal is the Ultimate Fabric Challenge.

Ultimate Fabric Challenge

The Ultimate Fabric Challenge is an eSports skills competition, based on a series of cybersecurity challenges within a virtual “customer site” environment. The game engine is designed to be light on resources so has a very Minecraft crossed with Doom95 feel to it, and has clients that run on Windows, Mac and most flavours of Linux. For anyone that has played a FPS game on a computer the controls are very familiar and easy to use.

The competitors are dropped into the virtual customer site where they then must move from room to room completing cybersecurity focused tasks, solving problems and investigating incidents within a Fortinet based environment all while working against the clock. Each task that is completed results in the competitor earning points and if they happen to be the first or second person to complete the task, they then earn bonus points. The environments contain hints and there are characters who you can “speak with” who can shed further light on what you are being asked to do, and some tasks are locked to specific locations or are locked behind other tasks.

When completing these tasks each of the competitors are interacting with their own virtualised instances of real products – not an emulated environment. Things can go wrong, configuration mistakes can cause catastrophic failures, and in all of this you are competing against other highly skilled engineers to get the tasks completed first.

In my opinion the Ultimate Fabric Challenge is the single best training resource for those wanting to achieve the FCX – the high pressure, time sensitive environment helps train you to deal with the pressures you will feel during the lab and helps with your decision making and time management skills. Look at any UFC leaderboard and the top spots are often filled with engineers who have achieved their FCX / NSE8 – that’s not a coincidence. The high level of technical proficiency and ability to interpret customer requirements and technical documentation at short notice are directly transferrable skills between the competition and the exam environment, as well as being directly applicable to high stakes real-world incidents and issues. For any engineer that aspires to be the best they can the UFC is an incredible tool to see how you stack up against the industry’s best and help you develop under pressure skillset.

Every UFC competition reaches its penultimate moments with the song “The Final Countdown” being played out loud within the competition area, with the round finishing at the conclusion of that song. Nothing quite fills your heart with dread and spikes your adrenaline as hearing that song start and knowing that you have less than 5 minutes to figure out as many of the remaining tasks as you have left. All in all, it’s an exciting competition that allows cybersecurity professionals to put their skills to the test, while getting experience on products that they may not touch on day to day.

Throughout the year, the Ultimate Fabric Challenge qualifying rounds are held at the regional Fortinet XPERTS Events – in EMEA, APAC, Canada, LATAM and the United States.  The qualifying rounds are split into 2 tiers:

• In the 1st round, challengers form teams of 2 players, to compete against other teams.  The top 10 teams (20 players) will move onto the 2nd round.
• In the 2nd round the players compete individually in a new environment with different challenges.  The top 20 players from the first round are joined by returning champions from the prior year’s Global Championship. At the end of this round the top 3 receive medals, and the top 10 are invited to the next Global Championship, held each year at the global Fortinet Accelerate conference.

At the global Accelerate conference, Fortinet make the UFC final a spectacle worthy of any international e-sports competition. The final is fiercely contested and is unique as it pulls the some of the best cybersecurity engineers in the world together and pits them against one another. However there isn’t any animosity, just respect. The competition drives everyone to be the best they can and gives their employers the ability to brag that they have world class engineers on staff. Fortinet gain people in the field who can best implement their products in a rapid fashion to address client cyber security needs – its the sort of win-win-win situation that would make Stephen Covey proud.

I hope this article has been enlightening, and I would love to hear about your experiences and thoughts around XPERTs or the UFC in the comments below. Thank you for taking the the time to read this post.