Winny Thomas, CCIE #23720

Hi, Very happy to let you folks know that I cleared my CCIE security lab today in bangalore. It was my first CCIE and my second attempt. I would like to congratulate IE on the wonderful products, IE-SC Vol1 and IE-SC Vol2. To start out with, after my initial preparation, I used Vol1. It covered numerous technology based case studies. The one on VPN was simply broad and indepth covering a lot of areas. Even all the others like IPS, Firewall were excellent. These gave me a very concrete foundation after my initial studies. After that I went for Vol2. I liked Vol2 a lot. There is a very good mix of technologies and I found the IE labs to have greater content, building of scenarios on top of previous ones, plenty of constraints etc. So they really load you up if you do all 10 labs. Some of the labs forces one not to use the standard approach of setting things up, instead using a lateral/alternate approach. As weird and strange these questions and answers sounded to me, it opened up new possibilities and ways of looking at things. Some of the questions I got for my second attempt were not easy to interpret or just simply seemed impossible on the first reading. But using a thought process picked up by using these Vol2 labs I figured out the answers. When I got the answers I wasnt 100% sure if they were correct by cisco criteria. But this much I know; if those answers turned out to be wrong I would have lost enough points to fail. So they had to be correct. Once again thank you very much. I wouldnt think of another product for my next track.