Preparing for the Google Cloud Professional Cloud Security Engineer Exam

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Google Cloud - Community

4 min readJul 11, 2022

Security is very important to every organization. If you are interested in learning more about security on Google Cloud, then the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification is the right challenge for you.

The exam was refreshed in November 2021, which covers

Configuring access within a cloud solution environment
Configuring network security
Ensuring data protection
Managing operations in a cloud solution environment
Ensuring compliance

Security touches also touches a few networking points. To help you be successful at this exam, I’ve put together a few tips.

Step #1: Check out the Exam Guide

The exam guide lists all the objectives to be covered. It is very helpful and at a glance you have an idea of what areas you need to learn in order to prepare for the exam. You can check out the current exam guide here.

Step #2: Sign up for Google Cloud training

After you have reviewed the exam guide, if you think it worth your time check out some of the Google Cloud learning material. Google Cloud has Google Cloud Skills Boost. Log in an enroll in your learning path and begin learning. For this one, let’s pick the Security Engineer Learning Path.

Once you select the learning path, check out the details in the Preparing for Your Professional Cloud Security Engineer Journey. This free training that will show you what topics are important on the exam, and give you an idea of where your strengths and weaknesses are.

If you are looking for other options for Google Cloud training, there are courses available on Coursera and Pluralsight.

Coursera links:

Pluralsight links:

Step #3: Hands-on Experience with Labs

There are several labs contained in the learning paths and you should aim to complete them. By completing the labs and quest you get the opportunity to earn skill badges.

You can also visit https://codelabs.developers.google.com/ search for networking or cloud security. You would see several codelabs you can do in your own environment to get more hands on practice. While learning you can explore the various options that exist in a services configuration.

Step #4: Security Topic Deep Dives

The Google Cloud documentation is technical documentation. Here are a few of my recommendations for topics you can read up on.

I’ve also put together a prep sheet for this exam available on https://www.startcloudnow.com/google%20cloud.html

Step #5: Sample questions

There are sample questions on the certification website that you can check out here.

Step #6 Sign up for the exam

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Security is a must for your cloud platform. Google Cloud has default security, configurable security services and the ability to integrate external security products.

To get a general overview about cloud security from a non vendor specific point of view, I recommend to read the CCSK documents which are free.
- Security Guidance For Critical focus in Cloud computing V4
- ENISA Cloud Computing Risk Assessment

Also feel free to check out my article —

If you want to ask a question, find out more or share a thought? Please connect with me on Linkedin or twitter @ammettw and send me a message.

I’ll be in touch.