Notes

Hey Friends, welcome back! I recently passed the Microsoft Cybersecurity Architect exam, after a week of preparation and as always I will be sharing my experience, resources used and my top recommendations if you are looking to pass this exam and get certified.

Now, before we start this review, note that this is an Expert level certification, this means that you do require a few other certifications before taking on this one.

These include the Azure Security Engineer Certification (AZ-500) and the Security Operations Analyst Associate Certification (SC-200) I have completed both of these certifications and have the reviews up on my channel if you are interested.

Lets dive into the certification details:

The certification is aimed at assessing the skills of an expert level cybersecurity architect, covering the design of security solutions within the Microsoft Cloud

- Design solutions that align with security best practices and priorities (20–25%)
- Design security operations, identity, and compliance capabilities (30–35%)
- Design security solutions for infrastructure (20–25%)
- Design security solutions for applications and data (20–25%)

The exam Cost is $165 in the US, and the price varies on your location.

The passing score is 700, there is no hands on labs, but there are scenario based questions and case studies.

The first step is to always review the Study guide, this gives you a really comprehensive overview of everything included in the exam, and it helps you tick off everything you know and have prepared for.

Something to note when preparing for this certification is the word “DESIGN” skills assessed during the exam is your ability to design and architect security solutions within Azure.

You will be given a business problem, this a scenario and some requirements, and you must provide answers that correctly support the design or a security solution that will meet these requirements.

Lets move on to the Resources and approach:

First up, the Microsoft Learn Site for preparation is the go to to review all aspects of content related to the exam. For this certification, I didnt spend too much time here, but I went through most of the content outlined in the learning path, if it also worth noting that the content is very similar to the AZ-500 and SC-200 content, so if you have already completed those learning paths, you can just skim through this one.

Next, Review the Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference Architectures (MCRA) and the Microsoft Cloud Security Benchmarks (MCSB). These documents will help provide context into how to align security capabilities and controls to best practises.

YouTube is your friend, and More specifically John Savill. John has an SC-100 Study cram which I reviewed a day before taking the exam.

Test your knowledge with practise exams, I always use Measure up for practise tests, this can be quite expensive so I have listed some alternate options below. It is worth mentioning that I have not personally reviewed these alternate options so I dont know how accurate the questions are to the exam.

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Final thoughts, I thought the exam was very closely aligned to the outline, if you follow the skills documented in the outline, and prepare for each of the line items, you should be able to ace this certification, also if you have recently completed the AZ-500, following up soon with this one could be beneficial, since it covers similarly aligned content.

Something very different to the AZ-500 is that this one covers alot of the Microsoft 365 security technologies as well, and requires you to have knowledge of the portals and settings that you would enable to solve certain problems.

Alright friends, that is it for this video, leave a like if you enjoyed it, and let me know in the comments if you will be taking this certification soon.

Catch ya next time, bye