Centri

What Centri is

Centri is an online cybersecurity training and certification provider focused on defensive security operations, the work done in a security operations center (SOC). It sells practical certifications to individual analysts and corporate training packages to security teams, and it runs a large free catalog of introductory courses. The About page says the company was formerly called Security Blue Team and was founded more than five years ago by its CEO, Joshua Beaman, a former cybersecurity analyst who could not find the hands-on training he wanted and started building courses on a subreddit. The legal entity is Security Team Training Ltd, registered in England and Wales, with an address in London.

The site says its e-learning platform supports over 150,000 learners across 80+ countries, and the corporate page claims 500+ organizations trained. The About page names governments, military units, law enforcement, CERTs, banks, managed security providers and educational institutes among its customers.

The certifications

The home page counts 19 courses and 5 certifications. The certifications, with the prices and scope the course catalog lists, are:

• Blue Team Level 1 (BTL1), junior level: phishing analysis, digital forensics, threat intelligence, SIEM and incident response. 8 domains, approximately 30 hours, £399.00.
• Certified Detection Engineering Associate (CDEA), junior level: Git workflows, Zeek, Sigma, YARA and AI. 20 domains, approximately 40 hours, £399.00.
• Certified Penetration Testing Associate (CPTA), junior to intermediate: the offensive certification, covering foundational skills, discovery and recon, exploitation and post exploitation, infrastructure, web and cloud (AWS) attacks, and scoping. 25 domains, approximately 100 hours, £399.00.
• Blue Team Level 2 (BTL2), intermediate: malware analysis, threat hunting, vulnerability management, and advanced SIEM and emulation. 6 domains, approximately 50 hours, £1,999.00.
• Certified Security Operations Manager (CSOM), advanced: how to plan, build and mature security operations teams. 6 domains, approximately 30 hours, £1,999.00.

Each comes with a professional certificate. The corporate FAQ says the exams are practical assessments built on realistic cybersecurity scenarios, testing whether learners can apply their skills instead of relying solely on multiple-choice questions. Each certification includes two exam attempts. A learner who fails the first attempt gets feedback and can retake the exam after a ten-day cooldown at no extra cost, and further attempts can be bought through the platform or arranged via an account manager. Passing earns a digital certificate and a Credly badge, with an optional physical rewards pack for purchase.

Each paid certification also has a free demo course, roughly an hour or two of the real material, so a learner can judge the level before paying.

Free courses

The free catalog is unusually deep for a certification vendor. It includes Introduction to Penetration Testing (a taster on what pentesting is, its legal and ethical side, and how it differs from vulnerability scanning), Introduction to PowerShell (scripting with practical exercises and a capstone project), Introduction to OSINT, Digital Forensics (with a practical challenge on an employee's hard drive), Dark Web Operations, Threat Hunting, Vulnerability Management, Network Analysis (Wireshark and TCPDump), Virtual Machines, Python and Bash. Most run about 5 hours and come with a certificate of completion. Completing all 6 of the introduction courses lets a learner claim the Blue Team Junior Analyst (BTJA) certificate of completion. There is also a quiz-based Cybersecurity Interview Preparation course and a short Mental Health in Cybersecurity course on spotting the signs of common conditions and supporting yourself and colleagues.

How the training works

According to the corporate FAQ, all training is delivered on demand through Centri's own online LMS, available 24/7, with hands-on labs, browser-based exercises and practical assessments taken at the learner's own pace. The catalog filters show which courses offer practical labs, videos, physical rewards and translated or text-to-speech content. Courses are written, the corporate page says, by senior security analysts, security managers and cyber instructors with operational experience.

Centri also runs Blue Team Labs Online, which the About page describes as a gamified training platform and cyber range for sharpening skills through realistic challenges and investigations. Learners can join the company's Discord and LinkedIn communities.

Corporate training

For teams, the corporate page lists packages built around each certification:

• BTL1, CDEA and CPTA: 4 months of on-demand training access, 100 lab hours and 2 exam attempts each
• BTL2: 5 months of access, 120 lab hours and 2 exam attempts
• Cyber Security Operations Manager: 12 months of access to BTL1, BTL2 and CSOM, plus 12 months of BTLO PRO

A buyer can generate a non-binding preliminary quote on the page, which is required before booking the optional guided demo, or book a 10-minute discovery call. Purchased products can be held for 12 months and issued when the team is ready.

Managers get a Team Leader Dashboard, which the page says can manage unlimited in-house teams. The FAQ lists what it does: assign and manage training credits, track learner progress and certification status, and monitor exam attempts and pass rates. Every corporate customer gets a dedicated account manager for onboarding, licensing and administration, plus priority support, and technical support for all customers answers most enquiries within 24 hours, according to the FAQ. A SOC Leaders Maturity Assessment evaluates a team across detection, incident response, automation and team capability, returning a benchmark score and recommendations that Centri uses to suggest training paths.

What learners say

The success stories page reproduces reviews. One enterprise reviewer says the BTL1 course works with logs, PCAP files, threat intelligence, MITRE ATT&CK and tools such as Wireshark, DeepBlueCLI, MISP and TheHive. A mid-market reviewer, Nathan Long, writes that "Blue Team Level 1 offers good value for money and feels appropriately aligned with the content provided." He adds a caveat: "The more advanced courses are higher in cost, which can make them harder to justify at scale." Another reviewer found the course material alone was not enough to feel fully prepared for an exam. The home page shows a 4.6 rating from G2 users.

Who Centri suits and who it does not

Centri suits people heading into or already working in a SOC: a career changer can start with the free introduction courses and the BTJA bundle, move to BTL1 at £399.00, and continue to BTL2 or CSOM as their role grows. Detection engineers and junior penetration testers now have their own certifications too. Security managers who need to train a whole team will get the most from the corporate packages, the dashboard and the maturity assessment.

It is a narrower choice for anyone outside security operations. The catalog is built around blue team work, with one offensive certification, so a learner after a broad IT curriculum or general programming will find only the introductory Python and Bash courses. The jump in price from the £399.00 certifications to the £1,999.00 ones is also worth planning for, as Centri's own reviewers point out.