: Students follow the cloud migration journey of a fictional company, addressing real-world architectural challenges and threat models along the way.

The rapid migration of enterprise workloads to the cloud has created a critical skills gap in the cybersecurity industry. Traditional security architectures built around physical perimeters simply don't translate to dynamic, software-defined cloud environments. Recognising this challenge, the SANS Institute introduced SEC549: Cloud Security Architecture in late 2021—a course designed to help security professionals design secure, scalable cloud infrastructure from the ground up.

Implement recovery processes using multiple tiers of "break-glass" accounts. Professional Impact and Certification

Principal Security Researcher at Vectra AI. Her research focuses on threat detection in public cloud environments, and she has presented at top conferences like RSA, BlackHat EU, and DefCon. She started as a SANS facilitator in 2016 and is the lead author of SEC549.

The year 2021 marked a pivotal moment for cloud adoption. The COVID-19 pandemic had forced businesses of all sizes to rethink their infrastructure strategies, leading to a massive surge in cloud migration. However, many organizations found themselves struggling with cloud security, often applying on-premises security models that were ill-suited for the cloud's dynamic, identity-driven perimeter. It was in this context that the SANS Institute, in collaboration with leading cloud security practitioners, developed SEC549.

: Designing conditional access policies and guardrails for resource access, ensuring that trust is continuously verified across workforce, customer, and workload identities.

Managing how millions of external users authenticate into cloud apps securely. Threat Modeling:

SEC549 was created by a team of experienced cloud security practitioners.