How to pass the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification

Today I took the Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification. This is how I managed to pass the exam. Again, as a bonus, I share here the study guide I created for this certification.

Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification logo

General information about the exam

• Length: 2 hours
• Registration fee: $200 (plus tax where applicable)
• Languages: English.
• Exam format: Multiple choice and multiple select, taken in person at a test center. Locate a test center near you.
• Prerequisites: None
• Recommended experience: 3+ years of industry experience including 1+ years designing and managing solutions using GCP.

Reference: Professional Cloud Engineer official exam page

Notice that, different from the Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer exams, the Professional Cloud Security Engineer is, as of the time of this writing, available in English only.

In my previous post, I shared the strategy I used for renewing my Professional Cloud Architect and Professional Data Engineer certifications. This time though I decided to take a different approach. Since this was the first time I was taking this exam, instead of taking the practice exam after finishing my research and studying all the topics, I decided to take the practice exam before anything else. This helped me to have an idea about the format of the questions, as well as to list the initial topics I would research and study about in advance. Thankfully, that proved to be a good choice :)

Except for this, my strategy was very similar to the one I shared in my previous post:

1. Read the exam overview;
2. Read the exam guide;
3. Take the practice exam. It provides an explanation for each of the questions after you finish and is very good to have an idea of the topics, format of the questions you’ll face and how prepared you are.
4. After taking the practice exam, I made a list of the products and topics that I found relevant for this certification.
5. As I started researching and reading about these topics, I found some links in the documentation that also seemed relevant and added them to my TODO list;
6. Next, I visited the products page of the platform and identified each product that could be related to the topics listed on the exam guide. For GCP, you can find this list here.
7. For each of the products identified in the prior step, I visited its Documentation / Concepts page and started reading about each of the concepts that I considered relevant for the given product from a security perspective. Check the GCE concepts page, for example.
8. For each of the products, I also did some “<product> security” search on Google and found some very good stuff :)
9. Also, I did a more general search for “gcp security” at Google. Again, I was able to find some very good general stuff.
10. Last but not least, I took the practice exam again (you can take it as many times as you want) to check how much I improved from the beginning.

Study guides

I know that’s a lot of work, so just like for the other exams, I created a study guide containing the material I used to pass the Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification.

Again, you can freely copy, change and distribute this material. The only thing I would kindly ask you is to keep a reference to original material and give me proper credits.

GCP Professional Certifications - Study Guides 2019

To use it, create your own copy. Once you do it, the spreadsheet will be made writable to you and you’ll be able to update the Status column, which you’ll help you to track your progress along the material:

A screenshot of my spreadsheet with reference material for the Security Engineer, Cloud Architect and Data Engineer exams.

Notice: though I didn’t have time to take the listed courses, I found good references about them during my research / study process, so I’d recommend you to include them in your preparation if you have a chance.

Disclaimer

This guide is shared with the only intent of helping people aiming to take the Professional Security Engineer, Professional Cloud Architect and / or Professional Data Engineer certification exams. Be advised there is no guarantee that following the guide will make you pass the exams. Use it at your own discretion.

Tips for taking your exam

Most of the tips I shared in my previous post also apply to this exam:

1. Know what each product does, what it’s good for and what it’s not good for, as well as its security characteristics;
2. As described before, you have 2 hours to finish the exam. Keep in mind that good time management is crucial for your success;
3. Don’t spend too much time on questions you don’t know. If you aren’t sure about an answer, mark the question to be reviewed later and move on to the next questions.
4. Practice as much as possible using the practice exam.

Conclusion

The Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification exam helped me a lot in guiding my studies to learn more about the security aspects of the Google Cloud Platform. It helped to have a more specific view about concerns we should have when considering or using many of the platform products from security standpoint.

I hope this article and the referenced study guides help you in your journey to become a Google Cloud certified professional and wish you all the success.

Photo by Ian Stauffer on Unsplash

Stay tuned! I hope to share the study guide for both the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer certification soon.

If you think this is helpful, please leave your 👏 and feedback below.

Thanks for reading and good luck!

Extra Notes

• The Google Professional Cloud Architect and Data Engineer certification study guides can be found here.