Hello friends and welcome back to my channel. Today I'll be doing the
much requested review of the AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Engineering exam.
So if you're looking to write this exam in the near future, then definitely stay
tuned because I'm going to share some great insights on what you can do to pass the exam.
Welcome back
to my channel. If you're new here, I'm Venicia, and I help women to succeed in cyber security.
Alright, so before we get into this, for those of
you who don't know, my background, I have recently started working at Microsoft, been there for the
past seven months or so. And prior to working at Microsoft, although I have many, many years of
security and cyber security experience, I had never touched the Microsoft technology platform before.
And I've
never worked on Azure before. So this has been Greenfield, for me,
it's been brand new beginnings. And I've been doing a bunch of certifications in
the last seven months in order to ramp myself up to be able to work like a pro and Azure.
So if you
liked this video, please remember to give it a thumbs up and subscribe to my channel.
Alright, so let's start straight off
with the exam details. This exam covers basically four modules, or four domains, I will call it. And
the first one is managed identity and access. And this is a big domain, it's about 30 to 35%
of the exam, the next one would be implementing platform protection, that is about 15 to 20%
of the exam, managing security operations, that's about 20 to 25% of the exam,
and then securing data and applications, which is about 20 to 25% of the exam as well.
So
this exam is a more intermediate kind of exam. So it is a lot more
involved, technically, then what you would find in the fundamentals exams. And it really
does require you to have hands on practice and experience on the platform. Typically, the exam
is for professionals who have been working on the Azure platform for about a year to two years.
So if you haven't worked
on the Azure platform, and you don't have much experience on the platform, then writing this exam
is going to be particularly more challenging for you specifically, and you might want to focus on
doing a lot of the labs that come with some of the training options that I'm going to mention here.
So some of the training that I used to
prepare for the exam is firstly, the Microsoft learn learning path for the AZ-500. Now this
learning path is freely available to anyone on the internet and you can go into Microsoft learn,
you don't even have to create an account, you can just go through the learning path.
But if you create an account, you'll be
able to track your progress and obviously continue and earn some badges, etc. In the learning path.
The Learning Path
is free booking the exam is not free. So just to be clear on that you'd have to pay for the exam,
but the Learning Path is free. And in there, you'll find a lot of content. And what's nice
about that is that there are also labs for you that's available in there that you can do,
you can create a Microsoft sandbox, which is free. And you can then practice building
out all these different components and adding the security controls to these components in the lab.
The second source I used is
the LinkedIn learning course by Pete Zegger is also got a YouTube channel, I'll link it down below.
And the LinkedIn learning course basically was a great summary of all the content that was
documented on the MS learn learning path, and he summarized it really, really well.
And he's also got great labs and hands on practice scenarios that you can explore.
The third one
and I think probably the most instrumental in me actually passing the exam has been
doing the Azure masterclass by John Savill John Savill, works at Microsoft. He's a principal
architect at Microsoft, but he has a YouTube channel where he teaches people all about Azure.
So do feel free to go and check out his channel. I
learned a ton from studying at Microsoft to where I am now a couple of months down the line from
John's YouTube channel. And before I took the AZ 500 exam I did the Azure masterclass, it's about
19 hours of content, it is in depth it is all the details that you need to know what everything does
on Azure. And it really, really helps a ton with framing your mind around the security components
that's required in order for you to implement the different components and controls on Azure.
So those are
the main resources that I used to study for the exam. Now, I also used The measure up website,
that measure app is a site where you can find practice exams. And I highly,
highly suggest and recommend, especially if you are not used to writing online exams,
you can find a whole bunch of exams on there. These are not actual exams, but it is
it allows you to get into the frame of mind of how the questions are being asked in the actual exam.
So that, you know, you can firstly
measure your knowledge of what you've learnt already. And secondly, you know, how you're doing
in terms of, you know, what percentage are you scoring on the practice exams,
and whether you are ready for the real world exam. So measure up is a great resource to go and
do the practice exams, do the mock exams and see how you're doing in your study process.
And then I think one of the final things I'd
like to emphasize on is the fact that you really need to focus on practicing and practicing. And
actually, when that when the professionals are going through the theoretical content,
actually check on the portal where those things are in the portal
check. You know how to configure those things in the portal,
read up on what the best practices are for those controls that that you are learning about Because
that's going to help you significantly with how the questions are being asked in the exam.
Now, as for the exam itself,
the exam had a bunch of scenario based questions in ending a bunch of questions and answers.
It did cover, you know, asking questions around how things would be configured
in a JSON template, how things would be configured from a KQL query perspective,
from a PowerShell perspective, the exam scenarios are quite in depth.
So, you know,
let's think that there's different organizations that may need different Network configurations.
And where would you do what, you know, which controls would you implement? What would you do
about, you know, configuring does the need in that region and has access to that key vault etc.
So there are scenarios and the questions does require you to know how to do things,
to know how to apply your knowledge as opposed to knowing what it is.
So I think the
final thing is that the exam is just over two hours long. I spent about an hour and a half
writing the exam is going through everything. And yeah, I think that's about it.
So if you are
looking to take this exam in the near future, I'd like to hear from you let me know down below in
the comments if you have any other questions and good luck to everyone who's exploring an Azure
certification journey now or in the next year
If you liked this
video, please remember to give it a thumbs up, subscribe to my channel and catch you next time.