Stuart Scott - AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

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First published: August 2020

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With over two decades in the IT industry, Stuart Scott has an extensive background covering a range of technologies, but his passion is centered around Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Stuart is the AWS content and security lead at Cloud Academy where he has created over 80 courses teaching over 100,000 students. His content focuses on cloud security and compliance, and how to implement and configure AWS services to protect, monitor, and secure customer data in AWS.

Stuart has written many cloud security blogs and regularly hosts webinars with AWS and leading AWS partners.

He is a certified expert within the Experts-Exchange community. In January 2016 he was awarded Expert of the Year for his sharing of knowledge on cloud services with the community.

Sriya Potham is an experienced security professional and cloud evangelist and is currently a cloud security architect managing e-commerce, AWS, and SaaS security. She has obtained both the AWS Solutions Architect Associate and AWS Security Specialty certifications and has been involved in the development of cloud programs at major Fortune 500 companies in the travel, financial, and consumer goods sectors. Outside of work, she enjoys practicing and teaching yoga.

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This book will provide you with a deep understanding of the different security mechanisms that can be applied when architecting within the cloud, specifically within AWS. Security should always be the number one factor when deploying solutions, and understanding the impact of security at every layer is a requirement for any security practitioner.

You will be guided through every layer of AWS security from the following perspectives:

• Access management and the different techniques that can be applied to enforce it

• Policy management to understand how to define permissions that should be applied
• Host security, defining best practices on protecting instances
• Network and application security, ensuring neither are left vulnerable to exposures, vulnerabilities, or attacks
• Incident response, and how to manage security incidents to minimize the blast radius
• Log management, allowing full tracking and tracing of your solutions to automatically detect and remediate any issues found
• How to accurately record and audit your infrastructure to maintain compliance with governance standards
• Data protection, covering different encryption mechanisms to ensure your data is protected at rest and in transit

The AWS Certified Security Specialty certification is recommended for those who have at least 2 years of practical AWS production deployment experience, due to the level of depth and technical ability that is expected from the candidate.

You should also have some basic knowledge of security principles and concepts and, ideally, come from a background in IT security and governance. Also, if you are responsible for maintaining and implementing AWS security across production environments and are in a position similar to the following roles, then you are ideally suited to certify in this area: