Securing AWS Services

WEBVTT Welcome and thanks for joining us for this overview for securing AWS services. We're looking forward to getting into this course. We've got, again, it's only a handful of episodes, but really good important information. I'm going to be your host for this series, Sophie Goodwin. I'm going to be asking questions that you might have at home, but obviously you're not here to ask them. I'm going to be like a learner advocate because I'm learning this stuff right along with you. I've hosted other security focus courses here on the site, like Intro to AWS Cloud Pentesting, and I recently obtained my first cybersecurity certification. So working on learning more and getting more familiar with things in this field. But with me is Jill West. She's going to be our subject matter expert for this course, and she is really well versed in AWS a lot more than I am. So Jill, tell us a little bit about yourself. I'm going to keep congratulating you on your IC certification. I'm just excited about that. So my name is Jill West. My background is actually in education. I'm an instructor at a technical college in Georgia. I've taught everything from kindergarten through higher ed, and I mean every single grade in between in a lot of different subjects. And then about 12 years ago, I started migrating into IT, and I started developing CompTIA A Plus course material for Cengage. I moved from there into CompTIA Network Plus for Cengage. I still write that one. And then we added CompTIA Cloud Plus a few years ago. We have the first edition that came out, and then we've already into the second edition. And then we started talking about the third edition recently, so we can start updating this material yet again. We have to keep updating it often. I also have a lot of different CompTIA certifications and other IT certifications. I think I've got almost all of the CompTIA certifications now working to finish up those last couple. A few Microsoft certs, a few AWS certs already working on my next one. And teaching IT at this time with cloud, like this is just an amazing time to be in IT as an educator. IT is the way we do cloud in today's world, and so it's also becoming the way that we teach IT in higher ed. So we're having to rethink and reinvent IT education. We need to incorporate cloud into everything. It's not just a single course that we fit into the learning path. It's a new way of thinking that we work into every single course. I'm just really excited to be teaching this material. Seems like there's new ground to cover every day, which probably does make it exciting to teach. And some of you that are here watching this course may be looking to take that AWS Security Specialty exam. So we'll get more to that in a minute, but just in general for those that are watching this course, what would you say is the target audience as far as experience level goes? So AWS says for this exam that they expect people coming in to take it that would reasonably have a chance of passing it. That you've got at least five years experience in IT security. So this would be where you're designing and implementing security solutions. They also recommend that you've had at the very least two years of hands-on experience securing workloads in the AWS cloud. So this is not two years from the time you created your first AWS account. This is two years of actually designing security systems to secure those workloads in AWS, and not even necessarily another cloud that you need to be very familiar with the AWS resources and best practices and tools so that you can come in and succeed with this exam. And if you've been working through some of the other modules or courses that Jill and I have worked on together, you may have seen that we've been referring a lot to those objectives for that AWS Security Specialty exam. So if you are here watching this looking to take that exam, you might see a little bit less of that in this course, right? Because this is a lot of just like things that maybe you need to know, even if it's not directly on the exam, it's important information, right? Right, exactly. So we've spent a lot of time making sure that our courses were revolving around those objectives. But I got to the end of designing this course and I realized, you know, there are some pieces that we didn't quite touch on because they weren't listed in the objectives. And I thought, but this is stuff that you really need to know. It's appropriate for this level of expertise. It's not something where I'm trying to push you beyond the objectives. It's just things that I think should have been in the objectives and they weren't. So this course, I looked at four different categories of services. We've got compute and storage and database and then code development. And I picked a few concepts and a few tools and a few best practices that belong in each of these categories. And that's what we'll cover in each of these episodes. Four categories. All the food groups are represented. There you go. Yeah, we've got it all covered. So this will be interesting to go into. We will talk a little bit about some of those exam objectives, but it'll be nice to get kind of more of a big picture view of some things that maybe you just need to know when you're working in AWS. So I'm looking forward to getting into this. Thank you for giving us an overview into this stuff. Excellent. And thank you for joining us for this overview for securing AWS services. We'll see you in the course.