Hello and welcome to this course where I shall be discussing the AWS Identity and Access Management Service, commonly referred to as I-AM or IAM. This is a key security service within AWS and is likely to be the first security service you will use and come across allowing you to configure specific access controls within your environment.

Before we start I would like to introduce myself. My name is Stuart Scott. I am one of the trainers here at Cloud Academy and I specialize in AWS, Amazon Web Services. Feel free to connect with me with any questions using the detail shown on the screen. Alternatively, you can always get in touch with us here at Cloud Academy using the community forum where one of our cloud experts will reply to your question.

This course has been designed for AWS administrators, security engineers, security architects or anyone who is looking to increase their knowledge of the IAM service in preparation for an AWS certification. This course will cover all features and elements of IAM which will include:

- What is Identity and Access Management: This lecture will explain what IAM means and why it's necessary to implement and maintain control of the service.
- Groups, Users and Roles: This lecture will define the differences between groups, users and roles and how each of these objects are typically used.
- IAM Policies: This lecture will discuss what IAM policies are, how to create, modify and apply them within your AWS environment.
- Multi-Factor Authentication: MFA. This lecture will explain what MFA is and its best practices.
- Identity Federation: This lecture will look at how to access your AWS resources using identities outside of the IAM service.
- IAM Features: This lecture will focus on the information contained with the IAM account settings, the credential report and also how IAM integrates with KMS, the Key Management Service.

By the end of this course you will be able to set up and configure users, groups and roles to control which identities have authorization to access specific resources. You will be able to implement Multi-Factor Authentication, create and implement IAM policies, allowing you to grant or restrict very granular and specific permissions across a range of resources, implement a password policy to align with your internal security controls, understand when and why you may use identity federation access and you'll understand how the Key Management Service, KMS, is used in conjunction with IAM.

Although this course will explain everything from the ground up to do with IAM, having some basic hands-on experience of AWS and awareness of other services may help, but it's not essential. Feedback on our courses here at Cloud Academy are valuable to both us as trainers and any students looking to take the same course in the future.

If you have any feedback, positive or negative, it would be greatly appreciated if you could use the comments section found in the landing page of this course. That brings us to the end of this lecture. Coming up next we're going to look at what is Identity and Access Management and what it actually means.