Certificate of Cloud Security (CCSK) Review

The Certificate of Cloud Security (CCSK) is an exam focusing on cloud computing and security. The exam is administrated by the Cloud Security Alliance. I have not seen a great deal mentioned about this certification but I decided about a month ago I would study for it.

What I liked is that you do not need to buy any studying material the exam is based on two documents the CSA Guidance and the ENISA: Report both these documents are free to download from the CSA website and that's all you need!

The exam itself is open book and done on-line from anywhere the cost is $345 (£212) and is 90 minutes long with 60 questions to answer during the exam you can mark answers that your not sure about and go back to any question in the exam. There is a timer at the top of the page telling you time left and how many questions you have answered. You also get two attempts at the exam if needed. The pass mark is 80% which I think is quite high. 92% of the questions are from the CSA guidance document with the remaining 8% from the ENISA document.

To prepare for the exam I simply read both the documents a few times the exam itself was not as difficult as I expected as I had read that the pass rate including both attempts was only around 55% some of the questions you could simply cut and paste sections of the question and search within the pdf study guides for the answers but the majority that was not the case and due to the time constraints if you did not know the answers the guides would not help you.

Overall I would recommend this exam to anyone that is interested in cloud computing it contains some useful material and although I am not a big fan of on-line exams as anyone could sit the exam etc. I think for the cost and with a lack of cloud computing certifications aimed at the security field this is a reasonable certification to purse. It is worth noting that the cloud security alliance has teamed up with ISC2 and are working on releasing a new cloud security certification this year this will gain more coverage due to the ISC2 involvement and is worth keeping an eye out for as well.

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