Murat Kokcu

My journey to the AZ-5OO certificate

My journey to the AZ-5OO certificate

Hi, my name is Enes Murat Kokcu, I’m a part of the Ordina security unit.

I will briefly talk about my AZ-500 journey up until the exam, which requires hands-on experience, overall knowledge of the Azure environment and how security can interact in and between different Azure components. I strongly recommend you get your hands dirty to prepare for this exam. Azure gives you 200$ credit for the first month, which is great for people that are new to Azure. For theoretical education, you can use the free Azure training path provided by Microsoft.

The course material is of high quality and very educational. For those who are looking for extra resources, I recommend the following 2 YouTube channels:

  1. John Savill: Technical Training channel
  2. Susanth Sutheesh: Microsoft Azure Security Technologies course

I would also like to share a link I found on GitHub, especially for the hands-on phase, which shows different ways to find solutions. There are tasks and exercises that you can solve from the Azure portal and also tasks that you can perform directly from your console.

You can find the solutions to these tasks on YouTube.

If you go through all these resources, you should be well prepared to take your exam. My exam had 3 sections. The first part contains approximately 42 questions, and they were multiple choice or drag-and-drop questions. In the 2nd part, you get a use case and 8 questions about it. In the 3rd part, there were 10 simulation questions (there are 2 versions of the exam, so simulation questions may not be asked). An important side note here is that if you have completed one part and moved on to the next part, you will no longer be able to go back.

The exam takes about 150 min, (if there are no simulation questions, you will have less time). I had the most difficult version, with the simulation questions, in terms of time. Each simulation question is different and there is no link between them, so if you can’t solve one of them, just try another one.

Finally, knowing user privileges and premium features will make the exam much easier for you. A few days before the exam, you can look at John Savill’s “AZ-500 Microsoft Azure Security Technologies Study Cram” video and refresh your knowledge which you can find here. I wish you the best of luck!

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