CCSP - how hard is the exam

mritorto2

hi everyone,

I passed  my cissp about a year ago and I want to take my CCSP by end of this year.

I don't have cloud experience.

I have 19 years of IT experience including vmware, AD , firewalls and infosec.

I have my SSCP, CISSP and security + certs, I had the ccna cert too, but it expired.

how many months should I study to pass this exam.

what books do you recommend I should read?

any free online training other than cybrary?

vCISO2017

Hi, you should be fine with your level of experience and qualifications - I'd say give it three months of study, there are three main books and I'd recommend Carter - check the lessons learned and exam feedback on this forum for several passes over the last year, best of luck!

Pmorgan2

I will be shooting for the CCSP in June, so I started some light studying. I watched the 15 hour long SkillSoft course for CCSP at 2x speed to get an idea of what to study.  I have less experience than you, and I'm feeling pretty confident after that 8ish hours of videos.  I expect to put in another 40ish study hours, which is 2-3 weeks for me.

You should only need a quick refresher on the infrastructure (30%), SSCP level security questions (30%), and operations (15%) portions due to your experience.  You should be strong on the application security (15%) being fresh out of CISSP training.  The legal and compliance (10%) felt different from the CISSP content, although I took my CISSP 6 years ago.  So hitting ISO 27000 series standards decently hard might be in order.

I couldn't find any good training for the CCSP.  I'm taking mine as part of the WGU BS in Cybersecurity & IA program, which offers Skillsoft and uCertify.  I have been told uCertify and Cybrary courses are trash for this course, and Skillsoft is not enough.

Others have recommended the ITProTV course ($25/mo) and the Sybex book ($21 on amazon) which comes with a quality test bank.

mritorto2

keep me posted on your exam results

beads

CCSP wasn't too bad. The wording wasn't as clumsy as the CISSP but took the later WAAAAYY back in the day. So YMMV on this one. Put about 2 weeks of evening study time into the exam and passed the first time.

For the record I generally have good experience with a topic before studying for an exam. Simply cram my way through those things I don't know but experience with the material is key or I don't test.

- b/eads