When I wrote the study guide for AZ-500, I was planning to write a study guide for MS-500, SC-400 or AZ-104 but when I saw the contents of SC-100, I decided differently.

For AZ-500 I counted 12 parts but now I'm not going to give any number. Seems that I write a lot, so let's see. There will a lot of stuff not belonging in any of the areas but all study is good for us!

I learned from the community and now it’s time to give something back to the community, again!

The sections

There are multiple different sections in the exam, I wrote them more clearly below than in Microsoft Learn site. The sections are based on outline per June 30th 2022

Download Exam skills outline from Microsoft Learn

Note!

Some exams are localized into other languages, and those are updated approximately eight weeks after
the English version is updated. Other available languages are listed in the Schedule Exam section of the
Exam Details webpage. If the exam isn’t available in your preferred language, you can request an
additional 30 minutes to complete the exam.

Design a Zero Trust strategy and architecture (30–35%)

Build an overall security strategy and architecture

• Identify the integration points in an architecture by using Microsoft Cybersecurity Reference
Architecture (MCRA)
• Translate business goals into security requirements
• Translate security requirements into technical capabilities, including security services, security products,
and security processes
• Design security for a resiliency strategy
• Integrate a hybrid or multi-tenant environment into a security strategy
• Develop a technical and governance strategy for traffic filtering and segmentation

Design a security operations strategy

• Design a logging and auditing strategy to support security operations
• Develop security operations to support a hybrid or multi-cloud environment
• Design a strategy for SIEM and SOAR
• Evaluate security workflows
• Evaluate a security operations strategy for incident management lifecycle
• Evaluate a security operations strategy for sharing technical threat intelligence

Design an identity security strategy

Note: includes hybrid and multi-cloud
• Design a strategy for access to cloud resources
• Recommend an identity store (tenants, B2B, B2C, hybrid)
• Recommend an authentication strategy
• Recommend an authorization strategy
• Design a strategy for conditional access
• Design a strategy for role assignment and delegation
• Design security strategy for privileged role access to infrastructure including identity-based firewall
rules, Azure PIM
• Design security strategy for privileged activities including PAM, entitlement management, cloud tenant
administration

Evaluate Governance Risk Compliance (GRC) technical strategies and security operations strategies (20–25%)

Design a regulatory compliance strategy

• Interpret compliance requirements and translate into specific technical capabilities (new or existing)
• Evaluate infrastructure compliance by using Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Interpret compliance scores and recommend actions to resolve issues or improve security
• Design implementation of Azure Policy
• Design for data residency requirements
• Translate privacy requirements into requirements for security solutions

Evaluate security posture and recommend technical strategies to manage risk

• Evaluate security posture by using benchmarks (including Azure security benchmarks, ISO 2701, etc.)
• Evaluate security posture by using Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Evaluate security posture by using Secure Scores
• Evaluate security posture of cloud workloads
• Design security for an Azure Landing Zone
• Interpret technical threat intelligence and recommend risk mitigations
• Recommend security capabilities or controls to mitigate identified risks

Design security for infrastructure (20–25%)

Design a strategy for securing server and client endpoints

NOTE: includes hybrid and multi-cloud
• Specify security baselines for server and client endpoints
• Specify security requirements for servers, including multiple platforms and operating systems
• Specify security requirements for mobile devices and clients, including endpoint protection, hardening,
and configuration
• Specify requirements to secure Active Directory Domain Services
• Design a strategy to manage secrets, keys, and certificates
• Design a strategy for secure remote access

Design a strategy for securing SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services

• Specify security baselines for SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS services
• Specify security requirements for IoT workloads
• Specify security requirements for data workloads, including SQL, Azure SQL Database, Azure Synapse,
and Azure Cosmos DB
• Specify security requirements for web workloads, including Azure App Service
• Specify security requirements for storage workloads, including Azure Storage
• Specify security requirements for containers
• Specify security requirements for container orchestration

Design a strategy for data and applications (20–25%)

Specify security requirements for applications

• Specify priorities for mitigating threats to applications
• Specify a security standard for onboarding a new application
• Specify a security strategy for applications and APIs

Design a strategy for securing data

• Specify priorities for mitigating threats to data
• Design a strategy to identify and protect sensitive data
• Specify an encryption standard for data at rest and in motion

Final words

Prepare Yourself and take Your time during the test. I always dedicate my tests for Sundays, for some reason it has been an excellent day for me to focus.

Never stop learning!

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