Cloud Foundations: Your First Steps in Cloud Security

Cloud Foundations is a free, scenario-based introduction to cloud computing and cloud security across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. Most cloud courses teach you to recite service names. This one hands you a decision.

You join Odapeeka State University, a fictional university, as its first Cloud Operations Associate, six weeks after a ransomware attack encrypted its file server. The CIO wants a recommendation: where the replacement file service should live, how it will be protected, what it will cost, and who is responsible for what. On your first day you also find cloud the university didn’t know it had: a research AWS account with a public bucket, an Azure storage account nobody owns, and a Microsoft Entra ID tenant with too many administrators.

Who it’s for

Career changers, help desk and system administration staff, SOC, GRC and pentest students who need cloud vocabulary, and managers who make or review cloud decisions.

What you’ll do

• Classify the university’s systems as IaaS, PaaS, SaaS or on-premises, and make the business case for each move, including the downsides.
• Apply the shared responsibility model to a migration and name what the customer can never hand off.
• Choose regions, redundancy and service families across AWS, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud.
• Read access policies, spot over-permission and rewrite them to least privilege.
• Set storage protection that meets a stated recovery objective and stands up to ransomware.
• Estimate cost with a public pricing calculator, set budgets and alerts, and write governance guardrails.
• Read an activity log, recognize a suspicious change and escalate it the right way.
• Present a one-page recommendation to the CIO.

What you finish with

Seven deliverables build into one Cloud Decision Pack, graded against a published rubric. Pass the capstone and the final assessment to earn Cover6 Cloud Security I, the first level of the Cover6 Cloud Security track, with a certificate listing 17 CPE hours. Anyone can check it at cover6solutions.com/verify.

Certifications this course builds toward

The course teaches the concepts behind Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) and AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CLF-C02), and builds the identity and security concepts tested on Microsoft Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals (SC-900). Practice exams for all three are sold separately in the Cover6 Exam Prep catalog.

Cloud Foundations is aligned with DoD 8140 work role 451, System Administrator (Basic), and introduces the cloud-strategy tasks of work role 628, Software/Cloud Architect.

What you need

Basic computer and networking vocabulary; the free Cover6 Foundations courses cover it. No cloud account, no credit card and no software to install. You work from the course’s case files and a workbook. The course is free.

Where it leads

Cloud Foundations is Level I of the Cloud Security track. The next rung, Cloud Security (Cloud II), is hands-on: you exploit cloud misconfigurations in a contained lab, fix them and prove they’re closed. Cloud II includes CompTIA Cloud+ exam prep.