3 ways cloud security skills free you to innovate with confidence 

While many organizations start their journey to the cloud with the primary goal of reducing IT costs, they quickly discover the advantages of faster innovation. The ability to provision resources quickly and run iterative experiments can help your organization bring products and services to market much faster. And if the experiment isn’t successful, you can simply deprovision or repurpose the cloud resources with a few mouse clicks.

However, sub-optimal security practices or misconfigured security policies can inhibit or delay the rollout of innovations. For example:

• Overlooking the need for layered defenses can necessitate fundamental changes in application design.
• Weak protections for personally identifiable information may force you to create and implement new access policies.
• Improper configurations of security policies for data stores can increase business risk.

In fact, insufficient attention to security during any point of the ideation, experimentation, and design phases can hinder an organization from innovating confidently. As a result, your organization’s teams—including InfoSec engineers, developers, IT business analysts, solutions architects, and cloud architects—need to continue enhancing their cloud security skills. Start your organization’s journey today by exploring the paths to building security skills.

Here are three key ways cloud security skills free you to innovate with confidence.

A foundation of security during software development helps lower risks in downstream processes

Many times, it’s ineffective to “paint on” security after an application has been built. Instead, architect security into your applications and data models from the ground up. For example, the decision to use data encryption greatly impacts application design.

During the development phase, you can leverage a broad understanding of security principles to protect your applications. Similarly, broad skills in security architecture can help your operations and DevOps teams minimize risks by properly configuring tools and policies as applications move into production.

For a basic overview of AWS security technologies, use cases, benefits, and services, start with the free, three-hour, digital course Getting Started with AWS Security, Identity, and Compliance. Next, review deeper security concepts—such as access control, data encryption, and network access—in the classroom course AWS Security Essentials, which includes hands-on labs to reinforce learnings. You can also take the digital course AWS Security Fundamentals, which is the equivalent without labs.

Shared understanding between IT business analysts and developers promotes secure and rapid development

To collaborate efficiently, business analysts and developers should have a shared understanding of cloud security technologies and architectures. This will help business analysts create application requirements that are informed by the possibilities and boundaries of security architectures. In turn, developers can speed up the development cycle by making realistic and secure design choices—achieving their core business objectives with fewer iterations.

IT business analysts and developers can gain alignment by learning about cloud security design principles and AWS services in the free, one-hour, digital course AWS Foundations: Securing Your AWS Cloud.

In-depth security skills help ensure end-to-end security

A deeper understanding of cloud security architectures gives developers, DevOps teams, solutions architects, and cloud architects a comprehensive toolkit to design and implement end-to-end security. For example, front-end developers will have a better appreciation for how their security policy choices impact the back-end infrastructure and DevOps deployment processes.

Likewise, software development team leaders can make more informed security requests to developers and architects. Lastly, agile software development teams can confidently build sound security practices into their application architectures.

Security engineers, security architects, and solutions architects can learn best practices for enhancing data and system security in the AWS Cloud by taking the three-day, classroom course Security Engineering on AWS. This course also highlights the security features of several AWS services, including compute, storage, networking, and database services. Developers, DevOps teams, and software development team leaders can learn about best practices for security policies, identity federation, role-based access control, and more by taking the on-demand digital course Deep Dive with Security: AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM).

Innovate with confidence

Building your organization’s security skills will give developers, security engineers, DevOps teams, and others the mindset and toolset to innovate with confidence. Start innovating securely and confidently by accessing the resources and courses described above.