Course Overview

More businesses than ever are moving sensitive data and shifting mission-critical workloads to the cloud - and not just to one cloud service provider (CSP). Research shows that most enterprises have strategically decided to deploy a multicloud platform, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Google Cloud, and others.

Organisations are responsible for securing their data and mission-critical applications in the cloud. The benefits in terms of cost and speed of leveraging a multicloud platform to develop and accelerate delivery of business applications and analyse customer data can quickly be reversed if security professionals are not properly trained to secure the organisation's cloud environment and investigate and respond to the inevitable security breaches.

The ExcelCR Intro to Cloud Security course will prepare you to advise and speak about a wide range of topics and help your organisation successfully navigate both the security challenges and opportunities presented by cloud services. Like foreign languages, cloud environments have similarities and differences, and Intro to Cloud Security covers all of the major CSPs and thus all of the languages of cloud services.

We will begin by diving headfirst into one of the most crucial aspects of cloud - Identity and Access Management (IAM). From there, we'll move on to securing the cloud through discussion and practical, hands-on exercises related to several key topics to defend various cloud workloads operating in the different CSP models of: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), and Software as a Service (SaaS).

New technologies introduce new risks. This course will equip you to implement appropriate security controls in the cloud, often using automation to "inspect what you expect." Mature CSPs have created a variety of security services that can help customers use their products in a more secure manner, but nothing is a magic bullet. This course covers real-world lessons using security services created by the CSPs as well as open-source tools. As mentioned, each course book features hands-on lab exercises to help students hammer home the lessons learned. We progressively layer multiple security controls in order to end the course with a functional security architecture implemented in the cloud.

You will learn to

• Identify the risks and risk control ownership based on the deployment models and service delivery models of the various products offered by cloud service providers (CSPs).

• Evaluate the trustworthiness of CSPs based on their security documentation, service features, third-party attestations, and position in the global cloud ecosystem.

• Create accounts and use the services of any one the leading CSPs and be comfortable with the self-service nature of the public cloud, including finding documentation, tutorials, pricing, and security features.

• Articulate the business and security implications of a multicloud strategy.

• Secure access to the consoles used to access the CSP environments.

• Use command line interfaces to query assets and identities in the cloud environment.

• Use hardening benchmarks, patching, and configuration management to achieve and maintain an engineered state of security for the cloud environment.

• Evaluate the logging services of various CSPs and use those logs to provide the necessary accountability for events that occur in the cloud environment.

• Configure the command line interface (CLI) and properly protect the access keys to minimise the risk of compromised credentials.

• Use basic Bash and Python scripts to automate tasks in the cloud.

• Implement network security controls that are native to both AWS and Azure.

• Employ an architectural pattern to automatically create and provision patched and hardened virtual machine images to multiple AWS accounts.

• Use Azure Security Centre to audit the configuration in an Azure deployment and identify security issues.

• Use Terraform to deploy a complete "infrastructure as code" environment to multiple cloud providers.

• Leverage the Cloud Security Alliance Cloud Controls Matrix to select the appropriate security controls for a given cloud network security architecture and assess a CSP's implementation of those controls using audit reports and the CSP's shared responsibility model.

• Follow the penetration testing guidelines put forth by AWS and Azure to invoke your "inner red teamer" to compromise a full stack cloud application

• Use logs from cloud services and virtual machines hosted in the cloud to detect a security incident and take appropriate steps as a first responder according to a recommended incident response methodology.

• Perform a preliminary forensic file system analysis of a compromised virtual machine to identify indicators of compromise and create a file system timeline.