Cloud consumers look for cloud services that follow regulations and core principles for maintaining data security and confidentiality. In this course, you'll investigate the cloud computing policy, which protects sensitive personal and confidential business data. You'll examine standard operating features, resource management, and security implementation checklist items and best practices for cloud computing. You'll then practice implementing policy-based access control for cloud computing. Moving on, you'll outline how to implement data sovereignty. You'll explore the international cloud computing standards, integrated vulnerability assessment solutions, and data security and privacy implementation in cloud computing. Finally, you'll outline how to implement and secure data and ensure availability in the cloud. You'll study the layers of security that can be implemented in the cloud, the cloud identity logs that help track events impacting cloud environments, and the OWASP Top 10 data-level authorization methods used to secure resources.

Cloud service providers (CSPs) must generate confidence in cloud service users by managing costs and risks. To facilitate this, they must provide tools to help cloud consumers create estimates and adopt the right risk mitigation approach. In this course, you'll learn how to manage your CSP-related costs and risks. You'll start by investigating various elements that impact cloud pricing, such as cloud resource types, the impact of cloud computing on chargeback, and cloud licensing models. You'll also examine how cloud maintenance services enable resilient and robust cloud services. Moving on, you'll recognize common considerations when addressing cloud computing risks, the Cloud Computing Risk Assessment Matrix, and how cloud risk mitigation factors are categorized. Finally, you'll outline why vendor lock-in is a risk in cloud computing, some risk mitigation approaches, and how to implement a compliance program in the cloud. You'll then practice creating cloud resource usage, cost estimates, and roles and permissions for AWS maintenance windows.

A DevOps approach to cloud computing helps establish a pipeline that automates end-to-end application deployment and management. In this course, you'll explore best practices for DevOps implementation, examining approaches to address and mitigate the inherent risks associated with cloud computing. You'll then compare immutable and mutable infrastructure and investigate the implementation of Infrastructure as Code. Next, you'll differentiate between continuous integration and continuous delivery and outline the lifecycle of CI/CD in cloud. You'll explore the concept of QA testing for cloud and how sandboxing is used in this process. You'll outline how to implement regression and load testing for cloud resources and distinguish cloud configuration management from cloud change management. Moving on, you'll differentiate between cloud automation and orchestration and explore the concepts of cloud patch management and cloud integration. Lastly, you'll practice implementing APIs in the cloud, using AWS API Gateway to expose services to end users.

Adopting the appropriate operational principle when managing cloud resources is vital in deriving an operational model that facilitates efficient and effective cloud implementation. In this course, you'll learn how to achieve a model like this. You'll start by outlining the differences between cloud and traditional data management before investigating cloud data management in more detail. You'll then examine cloud data replication and the methods and schemes used to do this. Moving on, you'll explore cloud storage and backup options and how to set up a cloud backup, the use of AWS Regions and Availability Zones, geo-redundancy design considerations, and the cloud architectural elements used to implement disposable resources. Finally, you'll clarify what's meant by cloud optimization and cloud metrics, monitoring, and alerting. You'll then end by implementing autoscaling in AWS, setting up AWS cloud resource monitoring, and centrally managing and automating backups across AWS services.

Difficult conversations can be stressful, evoking strong negative emotions, even becoming unpredictable or unsafe as tensions rise. Handled the wrong way, they can damage your work relationships and leave you feeling unsure of yourself. The extent to which you view situations as potentially easy or difficult depends on being aware of, and managing, your emotions. Change your mindset to believing you have the skills to engage in a healthy conversation and you will be able to listen with empathy and communicate even difficult news with tact and diplomacy. In this course, you'll learn steps to prepare yourself for handling difficult conversations. You'll also learn the key elements of being aware of your emotions before a conversation goes out of control as well as strategies that will help you effectively tackle difficult conversations in almost any situation. Finally, you'll learn techniques to end difficult conversations on a positive note.