Join us at SANS Secure March 2021
Secure Asia Pacific is a part of the Secure March 2021 event - our largest-ever regional online event with over 30 SANS Live Online Courses being presented on Asia Pacific-friendly time zones. You will be able to avail of all of our core courses as well as exciting new releases like SEC510: Multicloud Security Assessment and Defense, MGT516: Managing Security Vulnerabilities: Enterprise and Cloud and SEC588: Cloud Penetration Testing.
If you don't see the course you need at Secure Asia Pacific 2021 please check out the roster offered at our other Secure March events:
* Most classes at Secure Japan 2021 will be available in both English with Japanese language translation. Please contact us at AsiaPacific@sans.org for further information.
License to Learn Cloud Security
SEC488: CLOUD SECURITY ESSENTIALS WILL PREPARE YOU TO:
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.
Organizations 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 analyze customer data can quickly be reversed if security professionals are not properly trained to secure the organization's cloud environment and investigate and respond to the inevitable security breaches.
The SANS SEC488: Cloud Security Essentials course will prepare you to advise and speak about a wide range of topics and help your organization successfully navigate both the security challenges and opportunities presented by cloud services. Like foreign languages, cloud environments have similarities and differences, and SEC488 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 Be Able To:
LAB INFORMATION
SEC488: Cloud Security Essentials reinforces the training material via multiple hands-on labs in each section of the course. Every lab is designed to impart practical skills that students can bring back to their organizations and apply on the first day back in the office. The labs go beyond the step-by-step instructions providing the context of "why" the skill is important and instilling insights as to why the technology works the way it does.
Highlights of what students will learn in SEC488 labs include:
SEC488 Lab Summary
WHAT YOU WILL RECEIVE
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
Take your learning beyond the classroom. Explore sans.org/cloud-security and the SANS Cloud Security YouTube channel for a wide variety of cloud security-specific content.
WHAT TO TAKE NEXT
SANS offers a wide variety of courses to take after SEC488, depending on your professional goals and direction. Please review our SANS Cloud Security Flight Plan for a full picture. Many students follow with one of the following courses:
The first book will set the stage for the course and then dive straight into all things Identity and Access Management (IAM). Students will learn very quickly that IAM arguably plays the most important role (no pun intended) in protecting the organization's cloud account. In this book, students will be able to:
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
The second book will cover ways to protect the compute elements in cloud providers' Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings. Students will determine early on that there is much more complexity when launching instances or virtual machines in the cloud as opposed to on-premise. As the book progresses, students will learn to:
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
The third book will first focus on the protection of data in cloud environments. All too often, we are reading news articles about breaches that, very frequently, come down to a misconfiguration of a cloud service. Students will learn just what to look out for regarding these misconfiguration as well as:
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
In book 4 is where many network security analysts, engineers, and architects will begin salivating as they will do a deep dive into the ins and outs of cloud networking and log generation, collection, and analysis to set themselves up for success to defend their IaaS workloads. Students will learn to:
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
In the fifth book, we'll dive headfirst into compliance frameworks, audit reports, privacy, and eDiscovery to equip you with the information and references to ensure that the right questions are being asked during CSP risk assessments. After covering special-use cases for more restricted requirements that may necessitate the AWS GovCloud or Azure's Trusted Computing, we'll delve into penetration testing in the cloud and finish the day with incident response and forensics. Student will learn to:
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
This final book consists of an all-day, CloudWars competition to reinforce the topics covered in books 1-5. Through this friendly competition, students will answer several challenges made up of multiple choice, fill-in-the-blank, as well as hands-on and validated exercises performed in two CSP environments. They will be given a brand-new environment to deploy in two different cloud vendors and will be tasked to take this very broken environment and make the appropriate changes to increase its overall security posture.
CPE/CMU Credits: 6
Important! Bring your own system configured according to these instructions!
A properly configured system is required to fully participate in this course. If you do not carefully read and follow these instructions, you will likely leave the class unsatisfied because you will not be able to participate in hands-on exercises that are essential to this course. Therefore, we strongly urge you to arrive with a system meeting all the requirements specified for the course.
Students need to have:
SANS will provide:
Important! Bring your own system configured according to these instructions!
A properly configured system is required to fully participate in this course. These requirements are the mandatory minimums. If you do not carefully read and follow these instructions, you will likely leave the course unsatisfied because you will not be able to participate in hands-on exercises that are essential to this course. We strongly encourage you to arrive with a system meeting all the requirements specified for the course.
It is critical that you back-up your system before class. it is also strongly advised that you do not bring a system storing any sensitive data.
System Hardware Requirements
1. CPU: 64-bit Intel i5/i7 2.0+ GHz processor: Your system's processor must be a 64-bit Intel i5 or i7 2.0 GHz processor or higher.
2. RAM: 8 GB RAM (4 GB min): 8 GB RAM (4 GB min) is required for the best experience. To verify on Windows 10, press Windows key + "I" to open Settings, then click "System", then "About". Your RAM information will be toward the bottom of the page. To verify on a Mac, click the Apple logo at the top left-hand corner of your display and then click "About this Mac".
3. Hard Drive Free Space: No course VM is used in this course: Labs are performed via a browser-based application.
4. Operating System: Windows, macOS, or Linux have been tested to perform well with the course exercises.
Additional Hardware Requirements
The requirements below are in addition to the baseline requirements provided above.
1. Laptop Requirements for SEC488: Network, Wireless Connection: A wireless 802.11 B, G, N, or AC network adapter is required. This can be the internal wireless adapter in your system or and external USB wireless adapter. A wireless adapter allows you to connect to the network without any cables. If you can surf the Internet on your system without plugging in a network cable, you have wireless.
Additional Software Requirements
1. Adobe Acrobat or other PDF reader application
2. Google Chrome Browser: You need the Google Chrome browser installed on your system before you arrive for class. The course exercises have been tested with Chrome and not other browsers. You can download Chrome from here.
Your course media will then be delivered via download. The media files for class can be large, with some in the 40 - 50 GB range. You need to allow plenty of time for the download to complete. Internet connections and speed vary greatly and are dependent on many different factors. Therefore, it is not possible to give an estimate of the length of time it will take to download your materials. Please start your course media downloads as you get the link. You will need your course media immediately on the first day of class. Waiting until the night before the class starts to begin your download has a high probability of failure.
SANS has begun providing printed materials in PDF form. Additionally, certain classes are using an electronic workbook in addition to the PDFs. The number of classes using eWorkbooks will increase quickly. In this new environment, we have found that a second monitor and/or a tablet device can be useful for keeping the class materials visible while the instructor is presenting or while you are working on lab exercises.
If you have additional questions about the laptop specifications, please contact laptop_prep@sans.org.
If you have additional questions about the laptop specifications, please contact laptop_prep@sans.org.
Anyone who works in a cloud environment, is interested in cloud security, or needs to understand the risks using cloud service providers should take this course, including:
"I would highly recommend this training for my coworkers who are starting to get into cloud IR." - Jacob Pridgeon, Target HQ
A basic understanding of TCP/IP, network security, and information security principles are helpful but not required for this course. Familiarity with the Linux command-line is a bonus.
"More businesses than ever are shifting mission-critical workloads to the cloud. And not just one cloud - research shows that most enterprises are using up to five different cloud providers. Yet, cloud security breaches happen all the time and many security professionals feel ill-prepared to deal with this rampant change. SEC488 equips students to view the cloud through a lens informed by standards and best practices to rapidly identify security gaps. It provides class participants with hands-on tools, techniques, and patterns to shore up their organization's cloud security weaknesses."