Congratulations to Maksym Khramov on completing the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate course and getting the certification!
AWS Certified Solutions Architect is among the most valuable and highly sought-after cloud computing certifications in the world today.
This cloud architect certification was designed to teach everyone interested in the major components of Amazon Web Services (AWS). This certification supersedes the Practitioner credential and has two levels: Associate and Professional. Associate status ensures that the certificate holder has sufficient knowledge and experience to build reliable, scalable, and cost-effective cloud solutions. And Professional certification is awarded for the top-level cloud architecture experts.
To achieve the AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate certification, Maksym first has learned from the official AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate SAA-C02 course. Then he has deepened his understanding of the material with the Ultimate AWS Certified Solutions Architect Associate 2021 course taught on Udemy. After that, he has worked through the exam simulation by answering questions similar to those used in the certification test. And then, he has read the relevant Cheat Sheet series book – just in case. No surprise that as a result of these comprehensive preparations, Maksym has passed the certification exam on the first attempt.
All BSG team members continuously improve their skills and progress in the technology and cyber security certifications path. As cloud adoption grows year after year and only accelerates due to the global pandemic, we have to keep up! Most of our application security services focus on the cloud-based application, and many other penetration testing clients have migrated to the cloud infrastructures – either fully or partially.
We include a cloud security review as an obligatory part of each project with cloud infrastructure in scope. This exercise focuses on cloud security misconfigurations and poor operational practices that lead to cybersecurity incidents. We check network and storage Access Control Lists (ACLs), publicly available network services, and vendor-recommended security configuration settings, among other things.
We often find common security misconfigurations during the cloud security review that make Azure, GCP, and AWS cloud infrastructures vulnerable to sensitive data leakage and other severe cybersecurity incidents. From world-readable AWS S3 buckets to improper user authentication practices and insecure cryptographic key management – cloud-related security issues often take the most of our pentest report’s content.
Sure thing, some classic network security issues are simply impossible in the cloud, and cloud providers do an excellent job securing their services. However, a new attack surface emerges in the public cloud infrastructure, and many security features are not enabled or available by default. Thus a careful security review of cloud infrastructure often produces high-risk findings.
BSG is a cloud-enabled organization too. Our application security and penetration testing automation platform – D.A.R.T.S. – is built on top of AWS for security and reliability reasons. DARTS (Dynamic Application Security and Red Teaming System) ensures complete infrastructure-level segregation of our customers’ data and applies all necessary security controls. So logically, BSG will soon become the first organization to benefit from Maksym’s new knowledge, as we are planning an extensive DARTS architecture security review early in 2022.
We are proud and excited about Maksym’s achievement! Great job, well done, and keep up your great work!