passed CCSP exam

[Mahavijay]

Hi All ,

I passed CCSP exam on 3 Sept 2019. I would like to share my experience. I studied ISC2 Official Study guide and the CBK. I also took ISC2 published official question bank.

With the new pattern from 1 Aug the exam duration is reduced to 3 hours and that can be a risky affair for those who are planning and preparing. It took me exact 3 hours and I could hardly finish review of 3 questions that I had marked for review.

Make sure that while preparing you ensure to complete well within 3 hours so that at the time of exam you are on safe side. 4 hours is little too much but 3 hours is little less sufficient for you to come back and review in case you have some answers doubtful.

I passed CISSP 10 years back and that was on paper , no computers and 6 hours so very exhaustive hence won't compare that with CCSP but yes if you are already CISSP then you have a very good chance of clearing this exam.

There are some common areas between CISSP and CCSP but there are some areas/topics that are very specific for CCSP like service models and delivery models, cloud specific risks etc. so the scope and focus is what you need to be aware while preparing for this exam.

ISC2 exam prep questions are good for the alignment of your thought process for the actual exam.

best luck to all those who are planning to take this exam.

[rurubell]

I studied the ISC2 Official Study Guide but did not use the CBK (partially because I don't think the CBK 2nd edition was updated for the new AUG 2019 topics) and also because of reviews about the book seemed pretty bad. The Official Study Guide is fine as a foundation to get started but it is NOT enough alone and does not cover the full breadth or level of detail I encountered on the exam. The other thing was the online practice that came with the Official Study Guide. The practice questions are the same as in the book (far too easy), but it came with 2 "sample exams"...those were actually a bit more useful and a bit more similar to what you might encounter. 

I am relieved I read through CSA's "Guidance for Critical Areas of Focus in Cloud Computing 4.0" because it helped a lot and covered in more detail some things the Official Study Guide did not--I'm actually not sure if I would have passed if I had not read it over. https://cloudsecurityalliance.org/research/guidance/

Finally, I have mixed feeling about this one, but I did use this Udemy course: https://www.udemy.com/course/isc2-certified-cloud-security-professional-ccsp-practice/

I only took 3 of the 5 practice exams. I have mixed feeling because it had quite a number of product-specific questions and questions that required calculations that were not very useful. However, if you take these out, the OTHER types of questions were rather helpful and reviewing the explanations to these questions did help me learn some of the information that was otherwise not in the Official Study Guide nor the CSA Guidance but did crop up on my exam. 

[Mox]

Hi
I provisionally passed the CCSP exam today!!

I did the following

• Already had the CISSP (and it helped)
• I read the official study guide (first/second edition) roughly 1.5 times (skipped some of early chapters on the second reading)
• Read CSA Security guidance v4.0 and CSA  cloud controls Matrix (and looked at some other CSA stuff like TCI architecture, STAR -related stuff and  Egregious Eleven)
• Read OWASP top ten, but I was already somewhat familiar with the OWASP-stuff.
• Skimmed though NIST 53,37, ENISA, Uptime Institute papers (but did not read cover-to-cover)
• Did about 1000 practice questions from CCSP Official study guide, CCSP Official practice tests (this was 2018 edition) and from EDSUM. Did not do all available practice questions. If I did not know something in the questions, then i checked the stuff and learned the concepts. I was somewhat disappointed with EDSUM, because EDSUM did not provide any explanations why the answer was incorrect. Also note the footnone**.

Also in  2018 I had attended 2 day CCSP crash course with RSA -conference, but this was my first certification attempt.

**One interesting observation was that EDSUM CCSP practice tests/questions contained a lot of identical questions with CCSP Official (ISC)2 Practice Tests. I even noticed that there was an error in one of the questions, and even the error was the same.  I think this is little suspicious but I leave it for ISC2 to investigate if they want to.  In any case quality of  ISC2 Official practice tests/questions was much better.

[AlecTrevelyan]

Many congratulations and welcome to the club! Also, great write-up!

Just a quick word on Edusum... When I was looking for practice tests for the various certs I hold, I would inevitably end up looking at them as they do tend to appear at the top of web searches.

However, when you see the reviews on their site saying people scored 1000 out of 1000 (I actually saw this claim once!) you know they're full of it as ISC2 haven't published passing scores for a very long time and fairly recently also stopped publishing failing scores - hearing they're copying questions from other sources doesn't surprise me.

[Auraum]

Hi! I'm preparing CCSP exam. You and other members mentioned "ISC2 published official question bank". Would you please explain it more? How can I use it?

[AlecTrevelyan]

They probably mean the Official Practice Tests book:

https://www.wiley.com/en-us/(ISC)2+CCSP+Certified+Cloud+Security+Professional+Official+Practice+Test...

It comes with over 1,000 practice questions which you can either read in the book or use through an online exam simulator, details of which are in the book.

NB - As an existing ISC2 member you can get a discount on it too from the Wiley site - just use the code you can find in the Member Benefits section on the main member portal at checkout.

[khurtwilliams]

Is there official and unofficial practice exams available online?

[AndreaMoore]

Self-study tools can be found here: https://www.isc2.org/Training/Self-Study-Resources 

Scroll down to the CCSP section on the page.