OnDemand

Multiple Clouds Require Multiple Solutions

NOTICE: SEC510: Public Cloud Security: AWS, Azure, and GCP was formerly known as SEC510: Multicloud Security Assessment and Defense. It is the exact same material but with two additional days of content! The new title betters reflect the course content.

COURSE OVERVIEW

SEC510: Public Cloud Security: AWS, Azure, and GCP teaches you how the major cloud providers work and how to securely configure and use their services and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings.

Organizations in every sector are increasingly adopting cloud offerings to build their online presence. However, although cloud providers are responsible for the security of the cloud, their customers are responsible for what they do in the cloud. Unfortunately, the providers have made the customer's job difficult by offering many services that are insecure by default. Worse yet, with each provider offering hundreds of different services and with many organizations opting to use multiple providers, security teams need a deep understanding of the underlying details of the different services in order to lock them down. As the landscape rapidly evolves and development teams eagerly adopt the next big thing, security is constantly playing catch-up in order to avert disaster.

SEC510 provides cloud security practitioners, analysts, and researchers with an in-depth understanding of the inner workings of the most popular public cloud providers: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Students will learn industry-renowned standards and methodologies, such as the MITRE ATT&CK Cloud Matrix and CIS Cloud Benchmarks, then apply that knowledge in hands-on exercises to assess a modern web application that leverages the cloud native offerings of each provider. Through this process students will learn the philosophies that undergird each provider and how these have influenced their services.

The Big 3 cloud providers alone provide more services than any one company can consume. As security professionals, it can be tempting to limit what the developers use to the tried-and-true solutions of yesteryear. Unfortunately, this approach will inevitably fail as the product development organization sidelines a security entity that is unwilling to change. Functionality drives adoption, not security, and if a team discovers a service offering that can help get its product to market quicker than the competition, it can and should use it. SEC510 gives you the ability to provide relevant and modern guidance and guardrails to these teams to enable them to move both quickly and safely.

THIS COURSE WILL PREPARE YOU TO:

• Understand the inner workings of cloud services and Platform as a Service (PaaS) offerings in order to make more informed decisions in the cloud
• Understand the design philosophies that undergird each provider and how these have influenced their services in order to properly prescribe security solutions for them
• Discover the unfortunate truth that many cloud services are adopted before their security controls are fully fleshed out
• Understand Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) in depth.
• Understand the intricacies of Identity and Access Management, one of the most fundamental concepts in the cloud and yet one of the last understood
• Understand cloud networking and how locking it down is a critical aspect of defense-in-depth in the cloud
• Analyze how each provider handles encryption at rest and in transit in order to prevent sensitive data loss
• Explore the service offering landscape to discover what is driving the adoption of multiple cloud platforms and to assess the security of services at the bleeding edge
• Understand the complex connections between cloud accounts, providers, and on-premise systems and the cloud
• Perform secure data migration to and from the cloud
• Understand Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code well enough to share it with your engineering team as a starting point for implementing the controls discussed in the course

NOTICE TO STUDENTS

• Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) accounts are needed in order to do the hands-on exercises during this course. Students must create their cloud accounts prior to the start of class. Your ability to execute the hands-on exercises will be delayed if you wait to set up the accounts during a live class.
• These cloud accounts will incur additional fees from platform usage. The estimated cost for running the lab environment is roughly $25 for the course.

LAB INFORMATION

SEC510: Public Cloud Security: AWS, Azure, and GCP consolidates all of the concepts discussed in the lectures through hands-on labs. In the labs, students will assess a modern web application written with Next.js, React, and Sequelize that leverages the cloud native offerings of each provider. Each lab includes step-by-step guide as well as a "no hints" option for students who want to test their skills without further assistance. This allows students to choose the level of difficulty that is best for them and fall back to the step-by-step guide as needed.

WHAT YOU WILL RECEIVE

• Printed and Electronic courseware
• MP3 audio files of the course
• Course virtual machine (VM) with all lab exercises that can be redone outside of class
• Thousands of lines of Infrastructure-as-Code for each cloud platform that you can use at your organization

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

• Firebase: Google Cloud's Evil Twin, by Brandon Evans
• Detecting and Locking Down Malware in Azure, by Brandon Evans
• Top 5 Considerations for Multicloud Security, by Brandon Evans
• SANS@MIC Talk - SEC510: Multicloud Security Assessment and Defense, with Brandon Evans and Eric Johnson

WHAT TO TAKE NEXT

SANS courses that are good follow-ups to SEC510:

• SEC541: Cloud Security Monitoring and Threat Hunting
• SEC540: Cloud Security and DevOps Automation
• SEC588: Cloud Penetration Testing

Although SEC510 uses Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code to deploy and configure services in each cloud for the labs, students will not need in-depth knowledge of Terraform or need to understand any of the syntax used. However, students will be introduced at a high level to what this code accomplishes.