My journey to CCSK certification

~ Anjana Shankar

It took me about 4 weeks from deciding to pursue CCSK certification to getting CCSK certified. This blog post is an attempt to share my journey.

About CCSK

Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge or CCSK as popularly known is one of the leading certification in the space of cloud security. It is offered by Cloud Security Alliance (CSA). The Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) works towards defining and raising awareness around best practices for securing cloud computing environments.

The certification tests skills in a vendor agnostic manner, and discusses how can one secure data in cloud. It does not talk about knowledge specific to a cloud like AWS, Azure, GCP.

Key Areas Covered

The CCSK examination covers the following wide domains:

  1. Cloud Computing Fundamentals
  2. Governance and Enterprise Risk Management
  3. Legal Issues, Contracts and Electronic Discovery
  4. Compliance and Audit Management
  5. Information Governance
  6. Management Plane and Business Continuity
  7. Infrastructure Security
  8. Virtualization and Containers
  9. Incident Response
  10. Application Security
  11. Data Security and Encryption
  12. Identity and Access Management
  13. Security as a Service
  14. Related Technologies like Big Data, Internet of Things
  15. Cloud Controls Matrix, ENISA

Examination Format

CCSK is an open book exam. It has 60 questions that have to be answers in 90 mins. You have the option to go back to a question, if you do not know the right answer. There is no penalty on guessing, so do make sure to answer all questions.

Purchasing the exam voucher gives you two attempts to take the exam. CSA also provides instructor led or self-paced trainings.

My Journey

I have been working for about 4 years with cloud technologies and about 2 years with security related aspects of the cloud platforms. So when I began this journey, I had a fair idea of the domains mentioned above. It took me 3 weeks to go through this CCSK Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge All-in-One Exam Guidebook. After this I spent the next one week taking free available tests on the internet to get used to taking a time based test.

I cleared my exam on the first attempt. I would say the questions were tough, but being calm during the exam helps. Make sure to take it at a time when you are sure you will not be disturbed for 90 mins.

Feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions regarding CCSK that I can help with.