How To Prepare Your AZ-500 Exam
Recently, I passed the AZ-500 exam and obtained “Azure Security Engineer Associate”. Today, I would like to share how did I prepare for the exam and hope this will benefit you for your preparation.
The AZ-500 covers a wide range of security technologies in Azure. Here is a break down of what you required to know in the exam (Be aware of the following breakdown subjected to an update on Jan 27, 2021):
- Manage identity and access (30-35%)
- Implement platform protection (15-20%)
- Manage security operations (25-30%)
- Secure data and applications (20-25%)
From the above breakdown, we see the IAM and the security operation are weighted most. Therefore, the IAM and sec-ops on azure should be the focus for your exam preparation. The preparation material I used is “AZ-500: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies (LA)” offered by Linux Academy (Cloud Guru). I highly recommend the Linux Academy for the preparation because the platform not only provides a very high quality of the video lecture but also each section contains a lab you can do to gain hands-on experience for the material you just learned. I have to emphasize that the labs are very important and will give you a great hands-on experience in Azure Security technologies. Although the exam most part is multiple-choices, it is a highly practical scenario-based exam, you have to know your stuff so do the labs! Personally, I thoroughly went through each lab twice on Linux Academy. The Linux Academy also provides a sandboxed environment for you to play around. If you just want to build or test something out on Azure without worrying about the billing or break stuff, the playground is an extra place to gain hands-on experience.
The overall exam experience is great. Just like any other online proctor exam, I recommend you to have a nice webcam that can focus in to take a clear picture for your ID, and double-check your system. The exam software has to be run under “Administrator” to close all the programs prohibited during the exam which is kinda a pain. I have to unashamed to admit that I failed my first time, and was able to ace the exam on my second try with more hands-on labs. It is not an easy test, it really requires you to know your stuff, and has hands-on experience for each topic. After this exam, all the labs and preparation I have done, I felt more confident about Azure security technologies in general and learned a lot about the best practice to implement the security control on the Azure platform.
I hope my experience will help your “AZ-500” preparation in some ways and I wish you to learn a lot from the exam preparation. Until Next time :)
