Best Revision Books

For aspiring cloud network security engineers, books will be an invaluable source of information when working toward your new certificate. They will help you master the concepts involved in designing and operating cloud security solutions. Let’s review some of the best books for the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer certification exam prep;

• Applied Network Security Monitoring

  This book is written by Jason Smith and Chris Sanders to help candidates with gaining exam content mastery by specifically focusing on the most important topics of network security. It assumes a knowledge-based approach with comprehensive real-world scenarios that teach you how to manage network security. Most of the concepts in this material are built around the idea that no matter how hard you try, prevention will ultimately fail, hence the need to keep updated skills.

• Google Cloud – Professional Cloud Security Engineer

  This book written by Saransh Paliwal offers a great insight into best practices in the security field and a detailed overview of the topics covered by the test. It will help you to become proficient in all the required skill areas, including incident response management, data protection, organizational policies identification, and many more. After completing your revision with this edition, you will be familiar with all the important security requirements and most common Google security technologies.

Reference: https://cloud.google.com/certification/cloud-security-engineer

Skills Measured

This certification exam measures the ability of the professionals to perform a range of technical tasks. Therefore, you need to know the details of the subject areas covered in the test to be able to master the overall content. All in all, the exam contains the following objectives:

Configure Access in a Cloud Solution Environment

• User Accounts Management: This part evaluates the test takers' ability to design identity roles at organizational and project levels, automate the lifecycle management process of a user, and API usage;
• Resource Hierarchy Definition: This topic estimates the applicants’ skills in the creation and management of the organization. It measures their understanding of resource structures, security & trust boundaries in Google Cloud projects, as well as usage of resource hierarchy for permission inheritance and access control. Additionally, they have to be able to define and manage organization constraints.
• Management and Implementation of Authorization Controls: In this section, the students have to demonstrate their competence in the use of resource hierarchy for access control, separation of duties & privileged roles, and management of IAM permissions with the predefined, custom, and basic roles. It also measures their skills in granting permissions to various identity types and the understanding of the differences between Google Cloud Storage IAM & ACLs;
• Service Accounts Management: The questions from this domain cover service keys and accounts auditing and automation of rotations of the user-managed service account service and keys. It also measures the understanding of securely managed API access management as well as creation, securing, and authorization of service accounts;
• Authentication Management: This subtopic validates the individuals’ skills in establishing Security Assertion Mark-up Language, creating password policies for user accounts, as well as configuring and enforcing two-factor authentication;
• Cloud Identity Configuration: This area requires that the candidates demonstrate their skills in the management of Cloud Identity, configuration of Google Cloud Directory Sync, and management of the super administrator's account;

Ensuring Compliance

The last topic of the certification exam evaluates the applicants’ understanding of regulatory concerns as well as compute environment concerns. Specifically, they will need to demonstrate their knowledge of the security shared responsibility model, security guarantees in the framework of Cloud execution environments, security guarantees & constraints for different compute environments (Google Kubernetes Engine, Compute Engine, App Engine), and more.

Google Professional-Cloud-Security-Engineer Exam Syllabus Topics: