AWS Certified Security - Specialty - Passed!

averageguy72

Took and passed the AWS Security Specialty exam Saturday. 

I used acloud.guru, white papers, documentation for preparation - I would say acloud.guru provides about 75-80% coverage and their exam simulator is pretty similar to what you should expect on the real exam - quite a bit of depth on policies/roles and KMS.

On to Advanced Networking...and the remaining specialties.  This has turned into Pokemon for me, gotta catch'em all.

JoJoCal19

Congrats on the pass!! I just started studying for the Sec Specialty myself. How long did you prep for? I’m starting with ACG then was looking at Linux Academy as well. 

Clm

Congrats on the pass.

averageguy72

@JoJoCal19

Probably 3-4 weeks, in earnest.  But I've had some touch points with different aspects for several months working through some migration items and getting prepared for that transition.

averageguy72

@JoJoCal19

LinuxAcademy appear way more immersive than ACG.  I may use them in the future as well.

chrisone

Congrats! I might look into that AWS security cert in the near future. I see you are heavily interested in AWS, do you have any interest in Azure & O365 Security?

averageguy72

@chrisone

I'm planning on trying to finish out AWS this year and wait until next year to do Azure Solutions Architect and Azure Security Specialist.  My company uses both providers but Azure primarily Dev / AD / Exchange at the moment.

We may move more things into Azure over the next few years, so I've got some time to let the role based certs for MS stabilize.

chrisone

Cool, yeah I see more and more companies moving entering onto Azure. From a security perspective there is a huge hole in cloud security expertise. 

averageguy72

@chrisone

I certainly agree with you.  Every few weeks, it seems, we see another wide open S3 bucket, ES cluster or no-sql database full of PII discovered.  And those are just the low hanging fruit.

LonerVamp

Have you been a user/dev/ops on AWS for a significant amount of time?

averageguy72

@LonerVamp

I'm primarily on the architecture/security side.  I'm involved with DevOps but more for guidance/advisory than operationally.

I've only been using AWS for a little over two years; a bit over a year on my own learning/experimenting and a bit under a year for my company (been in IT for almost 24 years).  My company (no shot of ever using AWS and I was learning it on my own) was bought by a much larger company last year that is heavily invested in cloud in general.  We're getting the opportunity to learn, implement and use a lot of things we never could have previously.