The AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification is designed for cloud security professionals who have experience securing AWS environments. It validates expertise in areas like data protection, encryption, secure networking protocols, incident response, and risk management.
Key Concepts
Data Protection
- Understanding data classification and AWS data protection mechanisms.
- Data encryption methods like AWS Key Management Service (KMS).
- Securing data at rest (EBS, EFS, S3, etc.) and in transit (SSL/TLS).
Incident Response
- Evaluating compromised resources from AWS abuse notices.
- AWS services for incident response (CloudTrail, Config, GuardDuty, etc.).
- Incident response procedures and remediation steps.
Infrastructure Security
- VPC design for secure network architecture.
- Security groups, NACLs, VPN, Direct Connect.
- DDoS protection with AWS Shield and WAF.
Identity and Access Management
- IAM users, groups, roles and policies.
- Identity federation and SSO with SAML/AD.
- Multi-factor authentication with hardware/virtual MFA.
Monitoring and Logging
- CloudTrail for API activity logging.
- CloudWatch for monitoring metrics and logs.
- AWS Config for resource inventory and change tracking.
Compliance and Data Privacy
- Regulations like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, GDPR.
- Artifact for audit artifacts and compliance reports.
- AWS services for data residency controls.
Best Practices
- Implement least privilege access using IAM.
- Use multi-factor authentication everywhere.
- Encrypt data at rest and in transit.
- Enable AWS service logging and monitoring.
- Automate security best practices and remediation.
- Regularly audit and rotate credentials/keys.
- Leverage AWS services for DDoS mitigation.
- Integrate AWS with existing security tools.
- Implement secure network designs with VPCs.
- Prepare an incident response plan.
Case Studies
- How Netflix leverages AWS security services for secure multi-account architecture.
- Capital One’s cloud security journey and learnings on AWS.
- Intuit’s approach to cloud security posture management on AWS.
Certification Details
- The AWS Certified Security – Specialty exam:
- Consists of 65 questions to be completed in 170 minutes.
- Covers 5 domains: Incident Response, Logging and Monitoring, Infrastructure Security, Identity and Access Management, Data Protection.
- Requires 2+ years of production deployment experience using AWS security services.
- Costs $300 USD and is available at test centers or via online proctoring.
- Has no prerequisite certifications but prior cloud architecture experience is recommended.
Earning the AWS Certified Security – Specialty certification validates advanced skills in securing cloud workloads on AWS. It demonstrates expertise across key areas like data protection, encryption, secure networking, monitoring, incident response and compliance. This makes certified professionals very valuable for organizations running sensitive or regulated workloads in the cloud.