Has anyone taken the AWS Certified Security Specialty Exam?
I have over four years experience with AWS for a large organization and I’m currently studying for it and leveraging the Practice Exams on ACG.
I’m averaging 85-92% on the practice questions and filling all gaps on any questions I’m missing that I haven’t used with my job (Cloudfront, WAF, etc.).
I was just curious on anyone’s experience if they have used ACG prior to getting certified and when you knew you were ready.
Some AWS colleagues I have say the tests usually try to trip you up with "What’s the steps that would be the least costly" or "Which steps would meet the requirement with the least amount of administrative overhead" which can be open to interpretation based on any real world experience with AWS. That and if the test was written in 2020 but I know of a new feature that’s enabled that contradicts the answer I don’t want to overthink it.
Any guidance is appreciated on the actual test and how it compares to practice tests on ACG. I haven’t taken any other AWS certs as my job mainly focused on the security and governance of a multi account organization so I’m going into this a little blind.
2 Answers
Hi Shawn, it looks like you got a head start – I hope this resource helps you outline the differences in the questions: https://explore.skillbuilder.aws/learn/course/external/view/elearning/97/exam-readiness-aws-certified-security-specialty
Thanks Vinicius for the links I used them as a guide prior to taking the test.
For those who come across this forum I just successfully passed the Security Specialty.
Knowing that a 750 would probably be around 17 questions wrong out of 65 during the test I had marked 22 questions that I wasn’t sure of during the test for review. I went through each of them and guess that I changed around 6 of them. I studied for about a month and took as many practice tests as I could on A Cloud Guru and averaged 90-95% on the questions. The ones that I struggle personally were on services that I do not use at my job, mainly CloudFront with ALB and encryption in transit configurations and there were a couple of questions that had multiple solutions but they wanted a specific reason based on qualifier (lower cost, minimal overhead).
Either way, they make the test hard so that they ensure you know enough and a PASS is a PASS :-).
Thank you A Cloud Guru for helping another member get certified!