Status Update:

This is an update on my progress studying for the CCIE Security v6.1 Lab exam. Today is the 17th of January 2026 and im going to do an inventory of where im at and what i will be focusing on for the coming week.

Currently Studying:

Currently im doing a lot of automation studying. The ISE guys from Cisco have been doing a lot of Youtube videos on different aspects of automation, including Python, Ansible and basically covering a bunch of stuff. So im going through that at the moment.

Theory:

A lot of my information this week has come from blog posts (especially when doing Posture on ISE) and watching videos.

Compared to last week, I have been covering the following technologies/areas:

Posture.
Clientless VPN on the ASA (with ASDM).
Automation.
Some IOS related tasks, such as NetFlow, Authorization and so forth.
SAFE secure branch architecture guide.

Especially Posture has taken up a considerable amount of time. I got it working and then i broke it again. I think im running into a bug on my 3650 switch and/or some lab routing. I need to verify this again. Im slowly working on a blog post summarizing all i have learned so far.

These areas map to the following on the v6.1 blueprint:

The IOS related tasks map to this on the blueprint: IOS Tasks

The next one is part of SAFE, and that is section 3.8 on the blueprint: SAFE Reading

The third one is all about Automation and is section 3.9:

Number 4 is the dreaded Posture, which i spent too much time on the last week. This is section 4.9: ISE Posture

And finally just a refresher on WCCP, just to keep it in mind and ready to go (section 5.6): WCCP

Labbing:

Primarily my lab time this week was spent on ISE Posture. Getting every component installed and working is a nightmare (at least in my opinion). Its a really bad workflow getting everything working and i was guessing too much of the time. This needs to be rectified. But until i figure out what part is messing with me i wont be spending a ton of time on this for now. I will circle back to it later though. There are other more pressing topics to lab out.

However, i did find time to cover WCCP on both IOS routers and the ASA as well as some Remote Access topics on the ASA. It was a nice doing something else than sorting out the Posture mess :)

Labbing Next Week:

I will be doing some Automation stuff, to make sure i can put theory into actual usage.

SAFE Reading:

As mentioned earlier, i finished the SAFE secure branch architecture guide, so i did something in this area at least. But i will need to ramp it up quite substantially. There are the following documents i need to read before my attempt:

safe-secure-campus-architecture-guide
safe-secure-edge-architecture-guide
safe-secure-internet-architecture-guide
zt-frameworks
zt-network-cloud-dg

Those will the minimum i will read on SAFE before time runs out.

In Summary:

I still need to put in more hours, but its very difficult at the moment because of a lot of engagement at work and in my personal life. I will see if i can say “No” more often going forward. I want to have a good attempt at this thing to create a baseline going forward.

I am, however, quite pleased with the progress so far - im covering a lot of topics lately.

Thats it for now.

Take Care!!

/Kim