The Top IBM Security Training Courses for Beginners

Cyber attacks increased 31% between 2020 and 2021. In 2021 alone, there were nearly 500 million ransomware attacks. The need for companies to defend themselves from attackers never ceases.

There are approximately 3.5 million cybersecurity jobs available worldwide, and there aren’t enough qualified professionals to work in the field. That means that opportunities abound for IT professionals to upskill and get in the game. If you’re looking to advance in your current cybersecurity job or even to begin a career in technology, you can do it.

Where do you start?

The easiest way to land your first job in cybersecurity is to acquire certifications. In this guide, we’ll cover the top IBM security training courses for beginners to help you acquire your first certification and accelerate your career.

Cyber Security Foundations

5 days | Virtual or Classroom

In order to acquire your first IBM certification, you’ll need to have a solid foundation of cybersecurity fundamentals. This course, offered by ExitCertified, is the perfect place to launch your new career.

Geared toward individuals wanting to improve their understanding of cyber security fundamentals, this course will teach you about the challenges professionals face when trying to design a secure system. The course covers numerous topics, including incident response planning, the current trends in cyber-attacks, and industry recommendations for maintaining secure systems.

If you’re brand new to the field and want an easy place to jump in and learn all the basics, this is the perfect course for you.

Cybersecurity Fundamentals Collection

Online at your own pace

This free collection of courses is a great place to get your feet wet if you are not sure if cybersecurity is really for you. Provided by IBM, these six short courses cover cryptography, the ways passwords are compromised, basic cyber threat analysis, security encryption foundations, security information and event management concepts, and an introduction to IP and TCP v4 headers.

Designed to be completed at your own pace, these courses are just 30 minutes long making them very digestible.

Getting Started with Zero Trust

Online at your own pace

The Getting Started With Zero Trust collection will introduce you to one of the most important cyber security philosophies: Zero Trust. This security framework revolves around the statement “never trust, always verify.” This means that your system should never trust devices by default and should always authenticate, authorize and validate access.

These courses are also self-paced and are each 30 minutes long. Like the previous IBM collection, you will not receive a certification upon completion, but it is a good place to test the water.

IBM Security Identity Manager Foundations

4 days | Virtual or Classroom

Administering user privileges and roles can severely impact an IT department’s overhead. If your system is used by hundreds or even thousands of users, it becomes very cumbersome to manage, create, and remove these users. With IBM Security Identity Manager, the tasks associated with this aspect of cyber security are streamlined and automated.

In this course, you’ll learn how to manage organizational structures from the perspective of user roles. You’ll get hands-on experience uploading users to Identity Manager, and you’ll learn how to create both default and custom reports.