I passed my AZ-500

You may have seen a couple of weeks ago that I passed my Azure Security Administrator Associate exam. I was buzzing when I passed this, but it was a lot harder than I had anticipated. My key take-away from it was how hands on experience massively helped, compared to the old days where reading the documentation was enough.

Therefore, I would recommend you do the following if you are wanting to tackle the certification:

1. Read the exam guide and content... make sure you know every section and have a read of the relevant documentation for each.
2. Get hands on! I can't stress this enough. Get yourself an account in Azure and start building out the technologies. I'd recommend coming up with a real world scenario, and implement each technology you read about in my point above.
3. Get your head around the WHY. Each technology in the exam provides a capability... but why would you want that capability? What are you trying to achieve by configuring it and enabling it. This will be vital and helpful for the scenario based questions.
4. Watch YouTube. Yeah I know, there are loads of sites out there that offer dedicated training courses for these... but I find youtube videos of people demoing the tech much more valuable. You may even find free course overviews from the likes of Microsoft at ignite.
5. Have a read of the Enterprise Scale Landing Zone Framework from Microsoft. Although it doesn't give you the answers, it gives some great content on the reasoning behind some of the tech. It also lets you validate it against real world use cases.

Finally, enjoy your revision and don't simply cram. The certification looks great on a CV, and is a great achievement... however understanding the why you do these things will help improve your implementations security and overall security knowledge. Best of luck!