CCSP - how hard is the exam

mritorto2 · March 2019

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 · March 2019

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 · April 2019

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 · April 2019

keep me posted on your exam results

beads · April 2019

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

CCSP - how hard is the exam

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