Wednesday, February 23, 2022

Get certified for IBM Cloud, new certifications available

This week, I completed another certification, I passed the IBM Cloud Security Engineer exam. It is a natural step when you consider that many of my IBM Cloud blog posts are about security-related topics.

In this blog post, I want to give you a quick overview of IBM Cloud certifications and what it topics are covered for the IBM Cloud Security Engineer certification.


IBM Cloud certifications

The IBM Center for Cloud Training offers several role-based certifications. They start from entry-level exams for Associate Advocate and Technical Advocate and then cover roles like Developer, Architect, and Site Reliability Engineer. On top of these, are speciality certifications to cover special topics: IBM Cloud Satellite, the IBM Cloud for Financial Services and the IBM Cloud Security Engineer.

There are details provided for each of those which break down the required knowledge. Best of all, you can find a learning plan with related reading material or interactive classes. That's how I prepared for my newest certification.

IBM Cloud Security Engineer

The exam for this speciality certification consists of 44 questions and you have to pass only a mere 24. That's what I thought. But the questions are tough and cover many security topics:

  • Familiarity with cloud capabilities, products, and services around security in IBM Cloud in general which includes App ID, Certificate Manager, Secrets Manager and the IBM Cloud IAM concepts.
  • Insights into security logging and monitoring.
  • Security as it relates to virtualized and containerized environments (Kubernetes, Red Hat OpenShift, VMware, IBM Cloud Code Engine, ...).
  • A lot of network security as it relates to everything from bare metal to virtual servers in VPCs.
If you work with IBM Cloud, then I recommend to check out the current list of IBM Cloud certifications and officially prove your knowledge.

If you have feedback, suggestions, or questions about this post, please reach out to me on Twitter (@data_henrik) or LinkedIn.