Cloud Security Certificate Program (Self-Paced)

Self-paced online training with expert support Certificate with 2 courses

Two courses that take you from federal cloud fundamentals to a defended, prioritized hardening plan — the concepts first, then the architecture and operations that keep a cloud environment secure.

$1,250 16 clock hours Live Support Start anytime

This program includes

  • 16 hours of project-based training from experts
  • Answers from real instructors
  • Retake for free within 1 year
  • Access to class recordings (30 days)
  • Verified digital certificate of completion
  • Learn at an accredited institution

This is the self-paced version. For live instruction, enroll in Cloud Security Certificate Program.

This certificate pairs the two halves of federal cloud security. It opens with the fundamentals — cloud service and deployment models, what FedRAMP does within federal cloud governance, the shared responsibility model applied to real scenarios, and the essential identity, access and data-protection practices — so the vocabulary and the governance context are in place before anything else. It then moves into architecture and operations, separating the work of designing a secure cloud from the work of keeping it secure.

The second half is anchored to real incidents rather than hypotheticals, working through the 2024 Snowflake tenant breach and the Storm-0558 signing-key compromise, which between them cover the two failure modes that matter most: credentials without strong authentication on a non-SSO path, and compromise of a trust anchor itself. It also carries material most cloud training does not yet have — the CNAPP vocabulary broken into its actual parts of CSPM, CWPP and CIEM, post-quantum cryptography migration for cloud key management, service mesh proxy architecture, CISA's SCuBA baselines, and FedRAMP's shift to the 20x authorization model. The path closes with a workshop in which learners take a fictional cloud architecture and produce a prioritized, defended hardening plan.

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This course has a prerequisite

None for the fundamentals course. The architecture and hardening course assumes foundational knowledge of cloud computing, which the first course supplies.

Courses in this Certificate Program

This is the recommended order, but some courses may be taken in a different order.

Download Syllabus PDF

Unit 1 1 Day

Cloud Security Fundamentals for Federal Employees (Self-Paced)

As agencies shift workloads to the cloud, the whole workforce needs a working grasp of how cloud security differs from on-premises security. This foundational course covers cloud service models, FedRAMP's role in federal cloud governance, and the shared responsibility model, then moves through identity and data protection, secure configuration, vulnerability management, and monitoring and incident reporting, closing with a capstone that evaluates a federal cloud service.

  • Describe cloud service models and core federal cloud concepts
  • Explain FedRAMP's role in federal cloud governance
  • Apply the shared responsibility model to real scenarios
  • Identify core identity, access, and data-protection practices in the cloud
  • Describe secure configuration and vulnerability management
  • Explain cloud monitoring, incident reporting, and risk response

Unit 2 10 Hours

Cloud Security Architecture & Hardening: Build It Secure, Keep It Secure Course (Self-Paced)

Intermediate cloud security in two parts — designing the secure cloud, then hardening the workloads and operations — taught against real recent cloud breaches.

  • Trust boundaries, shared responsibility, and real control ownership
  • Human, workload and service identities, least privilege, and entitlement management
  • Network segmentation and Zero Trust per NIST SP 800-207 and 800-207A
  • Data protection at rest, in transit and in processing, and key lifecycle management
  • Secure configuration baselines and configuration drift detection
  • Compute, container and serverless hardening, with image and registry protection
  • Application and API security, service-to-service trust, and secrets handling
  • Security logging and detection across identity, network, workload and admin activity
  • Resilience, recovery, and readiness for compromised identities and accounts
  • Building and defending a prioritized cloud-hardening plan
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