The author details his experience with the Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals Certificate, particularly focusing on the Azure-related content. The author found the cybersecurity aspects straightforward due to his background but struggled with the compliance sections. He benefited from practice exams and an unrelated training video on Microsoft Sentinel, which unexpectedly aided in the exam. Despite initial nervousness, the author passed the exam and plans to pursue the AZ-500, Azure Security Engineer Associate certification next. The post reflects on the practical application of the learned material at work and his strategies for effective exam preparation.
Copilot Summary
I was awarded the certificate for Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals today. Here are my thoughts.
Overall, I’ve been enjoying these training paths and exams so far. The point of this training is to learn, and I’ve learned a number of things as they pertain to Azure, which is the whole reason to do this, so that’s good. I’ve already been able to put into practice at work some of the things that I’ve learned.
I did the learning path for the SC-900 exam, as well as the recommended primer “Describe the basic concepts of cybersecurity” just so that I didn’t miss anything that might be referenced later. Again, the cyber security parts to the SC-900 were rather simple for me since that’s my background, it’s all the Azure specific stuff that required some learning.
The training course was good and, like I said, I learned a lot. Some of the sections just dragged, anything having to do with compliance and legal things was painful. I have to do compliance questionnaires at work already, and legal compliance is one of the driest topics for me, so all the Purview stuff didn’t really stick.
After completing the learning, I noticed a little link at the bottom of all of the modules about being able to take a practice exam for free, so I did just that, a few times. I bombed it the first time. Figures. I took it a few more times and did a lot better. The practice exams are an amazing little way to study actually since when you check each answer as you go, it gives you an explanation about each option, why the correct answer was correct and why the other answers wouldn’t be correct, and gives clarification about what they do, so not only does it help with testing your knowledge, it also helps to increase knowledge, and I actually ended up learning a couple things in this manner that I completely missed in my readings.
Another completely unrelated thing that really ended up helping for the exam, was that the other day I decided to watch a training video online about Microsoft Sentinel. We don’t use that product and never will, but I wanted to learn more about it just as a matter of professional curiosity. So I watched this 2 ½ hour video on it, and there ended up being questions on the exam that were talked about in that video.
Since I don’t use that product, I have no experience with it. Reading about it can only do so much for me. I find that the topics for this exam that pertain to Azure features that I actually use were much easier to remember and answer correctly, since I have that experiential knowledge. Something like Purview, which I don’t care about and also have no experience with, well those questions were a lot more difficult to recall. Watching that demo video on Sentinel was as close to experience as I was going to get, and that really helped. I’ll have to do that for each major product introduced for my next cert.
The exam itself went well enough. I tried taking it in a different room in my house, and that didn’t work out as well as I would have liked. I tried taking it in our homeschool room, and the proctor said there were too many posters and books around me, so I had to drag my desk to the center of the room out of view of everything all over the walls. I’m just going to take the next exam in my laundry room.
I did better on this exam than the one for my last cert, though I thought I was going to fail it while I was taking it. I wasn’t nervous before the exam, but I really was once I started, but at least that made my excitement all the greater once I was done and saw my score.
Now I move onto the next certificate, the one that I actually want to get, the AZ-500, Azure Security Engineer Associate.
Link to certificate: Credentials – InfosecGreg | Microsoft Learn