I recently aced the Professional Google Cloud Security certification in my 1 st attempt after preparing for less than 2 months. the exam had a set of tough questions compared to the associate cloud engineer certifications that I had done earlier, the questions in this cert require more thinking through and are full of trick statements like which option among this is the cheapest, most secure or requires the least setup.
Trick questions are common in professional certifications, as the examiners assume you have a strong grasp of the cloud and can thus weigh the presented options and choose the most suitable one.
About this certification exam
Length: 2 hours
Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable)
Languages: English, Japanese
Exam format: 50–60 multiple-choice and multiple-select questions
Security Engineer Certification exam guide
The certification exam is divided into 5 sections each with its corresponding weight that is reflected in the exam. they are:
Configuring access (~27% of the exam)
Securing communications and establishing boundary protection (~21% of the exam)
Ensuring data protection (~20% of the exam)
Managing operations (~22% of the exam)
Supporting compliance requirements (~10% of the exam)
How did I prepare to ensure success in the exam?
While I have previously purchased video courses when preparing for cloud certifications for this one I decided to buy the professional cloud security engineer exam guide on Amazon by Ankush and Prashant and this was because, at the time of preparing for the course, the book had just come out and thus had the most up-to-date content. Books take longer to cover as compared to video courses which can be watched at 1.5x speed and be finished in hours. I wanted to understand Google Cloud security concepts and not just cram them for an exam hence my reason for purchasing the book.
The authors did a good job while writing the book as it starts with Google Cloud security concepts and goes through, trust and compliance, understanding cloud identity, network security, KMS, data loss prevention, secrets management, image hardening and CI/CD security among many other covered topics.
Since they are 15 chapters I made it a point to cover a chapter in 2 days and make thorough notes on it while still referring to documentation online to areas that I needed further clarification. I also took advantage of the professional cloud security engineer exam prep sheet which pointed me to various videos and Cloud Next presentations. Logging & monitoring was a particular topic that I fully grasped after watching a cloud next presentation and luckily for me, there were a few questions on it at the exam.
Why Hands-on labs are a must
Putting a lot of practice on the console is necessary if you want to understand concepts like how to create different types of keys like cloud EKM, HSM, CSEK, and CMEK on the Google Cloud key management service. you will need to understand how envelope encryption works as it's an important part of security and appears in questions on the exam. Labs also helped me understand cloud DLP, which detects and prevents the exposure and exfiltration of sensitive data. This lab helped me understand how large corporations like financial institutions that store a lot of PII deal with it to ensure no data leakage.
Logging and monitoring labs are important as you will need to understand how to make sense of vpc flow logs and also how to create log sinks and real-time analysis of logs in big query through pub/sub to better understand event logs and provide a place for logs to be audited. as a security engineer understanding such concepts and more at an in-depth level is necessary for you to be effective.
Coursera comes in handy for these labs and I paid just a small monthly fee to access them and put in as much practice as possible one particular lab that I enjoyed was the identity-aware proxy labs that can help you log into a compute engine VM without opening its SSH ports among other wonderful features that it has. among the other cloud, Google Cloud takes security very seriously.
I also put a lot of practice in labs on the security command centre, container security and binary authorization which was a tough lab but gave a lot of satisfaction when I accomplished it. labs will provide you with an avenue to test your understanding of concepts and also reinforce already learned concepts.
Effective Exam practice questions.
in the final week, I put a lot of practice through exam questions. Still, by this time I was confident I would ace the exam as I could easily answer most of the questions. Coursera has some great practice questions that helped me in revision. It would be best if you were careful of the resources you choose as some free resources online contain some unverified answers and thus it's easy to capture wrong information.
I made a free resource with practice questions I used to help you prepare. best of luck ahead.
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