Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By : Stuart Scott
Book Image

AWS Certified Security – Specialty Exam Guide

By: Stuart Scott

Overview of this book

AWS Certified Security – Specialty is a certification exam to validate your expertise in advanced cloud security. With an ever-increasing demand for AWS security skills in the cloud market, this certification can help you advance in your career. This book helps you prepare for the exam and gain certification by guiding you through building complex security solutions. From understanding the AWS shared responsibility model and identity and access management to implementing access management best practices, you'll gradually build on your skills. The book will also delve into securing instances and the principles of securing VPC infrastructure. Covering security threats, vulnerabilities, and attacks such as the DDoS attack, you'll discover how to mitigate these at different layers. You'll then cover compliance and learn how to use AWS to audit and govern infrastructure, as well as to focus on monitoring your environment by implementing logging mechanisms and tracking data. Later, you'll explore how to implement data encryption as you get hands-on with securing a live environment. Finally, you'll discover security best practices that will assist you in making critical decisions relating to cost, security,and deployment complexity. By the end of this AWS security book, you'll have the skills to pass the exam and design secure AWS solutions.
Table of Contents (27 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Exam and Preparation
3
Section 2: Security Responsibility and Access Management
8
Section 3: Security - a Layered Approach
15
Section 4: Monitoring, Logging, and Auditing
18
Section 5: Best Practices and Automation
21
Section 6: Encryption and Data Security

Amazon EBS encryption

I want to start with the EBS encryption service as it tightly integrates with the KMS service, which we already discussed in the previous chapter. EBS volumes provide persistent block-level storage to your EC2 instance, providing more flexibility for your instance storage capabilities. One advantage of using EBS volumes is the simplicity you can apply to encrypting sensitive data stored on these volumes.

When a volume is encrypted, it does not impact or affect the Input/Output Operations per Second (IOPS) of your volume and has a very minimal effect on latency. The encryption process is also transparent in its operation, and so, as a result, there are no specific actions required by your applications to access the data. 

At the time of writing, EBS encryption is supported on the following instance types; however, I suggest you review the latest supported instances at https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/EBSEncryption.html#ebs-encryption...