Passing The Microsoft AZ-900 Exam

Getting Microsoft Certified for Azure Fundamentals

I decided to challenge the AZ-900 Exam, as I got a Microsoft voucher for a free exam attempt. So, I decided to give the exam a crack. Basing it off other peer’s experience, who had already taken this exam. The consensus I had heard is that it should be a simple exam if you have used Azure before and worked on different services (e.g., IaaS, PaaS, SaaS.) I probably spent about less than 8 hours prepping, as I felt the topics seemed general and things I have already been exposed too.

Prepping to take the exam

My personal experience with Azure is that I have worked with it for 3+ years. If you have spent a lot of time in the Azure environment building things, configuring things and managing different items. You will have no problem challenging this exam. Most of the concepts are related to everyday tasks that you would be working on. Or tasks you would have been exposed to at some point while engineering designs in Azure.

Here is a score list of what you need to know –> https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/az-900

• Cloud concepts (20-25%)
• Core Azure services (15-20%)
• Core solutions and management tools on Azure (10-15%)
• General security and network security features (10-15%)
• Identity, governance, privacy, and compliance features (20-25%)
• Azure cost management and Service Level Agreements (10-15%)
  

Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

Equifax Breach Lessons Learned

After reading the Equifax breach report released by U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. This would be a great post to summarize and list out key items that went wrong in the Equifax breach. Hopefully, it will lead to a wake up call for other companies in order to better their own information security. 

Security Representative on the Core team

It’s highly important to have someone that understands information security on your core team. Many times, the task gets pushed to the Legal or IT team core team members. This is one of the reasons that led to the breach. IT operational tasks and security tasks need to fall under a specific leader. Ideally, someone that understand security and not just IT. In Equifax’s case, security was represented by the IT team core member. However, their views were not in line with the security team leader. Therefore, something that may be of risk may not reach the CEO’s level and will get missed. However, Read The Full Post

SSL Cert Options

SSL Certificates

To Start off, I am going to break this post into many parts.
This will be part 1

So lately, I have been looking at different SSL Cert options that are out there for your applications and machines.

Let’s face it unless you’re a small to large business you may not see a huge investment with SSL certs.

Personally, I think  it’s a general good practice most people should adopt it for everything.
I’ve seen some people complain that adding a layer of SSL decreases server performance.

In my opinion most machines these days are fairly powerful.
Or, at least powerful enough to take on something like SSL, so I don’t see that as a very valid excuse at all.

The main reason people may not wish to make use of SSL is due to the costs, or the lack of knowledge on how to properly make use of one.

And, my hope is to find a reliable SSL Cert CA, that also is reasonably priced and affordable for the average blog poster.

I found an interesting website that actually did an analysis on this issue awhile back.

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