We are excited to announce the launch of the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) 2024 Security Professional certification and course!

This certification is tailored for security professionals, solution architects, IT administrators, cloud engineers, and anyone responsible for securing OCI environments. It focuses on using OCI’s core security services to create secure cloud environments for applications and resources.

OCI Security Platform

OCI Security Platform delivers robust, multi-layered protection through a variety of integrated services. OCI security offerings include the OCI Threat Intelligence Service, OCI Cloud Guard, OCI Network Firewall, OCI Security Zones, and OCI Vulnerability Scanning Service. These services work together to detect and prevent threats, manage security postures, and enhance data protection. Additionally, features like data encryption, multi-factor authentication (MFA), and automated security monitoring strengthen the overall security, allowing you to effectively protect OCI environments.

What’s new!! 

Use Cases - OCI Security Services

 

The course has been restructured into five domains to provide a more comprehensive learning experience. Each domain focuses on critical aspects of cloud security, ensuring that you have the knowledge and skills needed to create and maintain secure OCI environments. The diagram above shows the OCI security services covered in each domain, with brief descriptions below highlighting what each domain covers.

Domain 1: Identity and Access Management (IAM)

  • Learn how to manage user identities and access to resources in OCI.
  • Understand the principles of least privilege and role-based access control.
  • Understand OCI IAM capabilities including identity domains, password policies, adaptive security, and dynamic groups.

Domain 2: Infrastructure Protection

  • Discover best practices for securing OCI infrastructure components.
  • Dive into network security, including network firewall, security lists, and network security groups.
  • Learn how to utilize certificates to secure in-transit communications and explore the use of load balancers for high availability of your resources.
  • Understand the implementation and benefits of Web Application Firewall (WAF).

Domain 3: OS and Workload Protection

  • Focus on securing operating systems and applications running on OCI.
  • Understand patch management, configuration management, and vulnerability assessments.
  • Implement security controls to protect against malware, exploits, and unauthorized changes.

Domain 4: Data Protection

  • Explore methods for securing data at rest within OCI using the Data safe service.
  • Learn about encryption technologies, key management, and data masking.
  • Explore OCI Key Management Service (KMS) offerings, including lessons on OCI Vault, secrets, Dedicated KMS, and external KMS, with use cases to understand them better.

Domain 5: Detection and Remediation

  • Develop skills to detect and respond to security incidents in OCI.
  • Learn about monitoring tools, logging, and threat detection services.
  • Implement Cloud Guard for proactive security posture management, Threat Intelligence for identifying risky indicators, and Security Zones to prevent misconfigurations.

In addition to restructuring the course, we have updated our lessons and demos to reflect the most recent security service releases. Here are some highlighted updates in the 2024 release:

  • OCI IAM module now includes identity domains for advanced access management.
  • We have included a new module on Oracle Access Governance services, designed to help you understand how to automate access provisioning, manage access permissions and infrastructure policies, detect anomalies, and remediate security risks effectively.
  • OCI Certificates service lessons and demos now cover certificate lifecycle management workflows and practical implementation use cases.
  • OCI Vulnerability Scanning Service (VSS) updates cover how you can manage vulnerabilities in instances and container images, seamlessly integrating with Cloud Guard.
  • Updates to the OCI KMS module include Dedicated and External KMS offerings, as well as practical use cases for better understanding.
  • Finally, you can explore OCI Security services with a use case that demonstrates secure deployment scenarios, addressing common concerns when migrating to OCI and ensures a strong security posture for deployments.

Hands-on-Performance Exam (HPE)

The OCI Security Professional exam includes a Hands-on Performance Exam (HPE), which evaluates your practical skills in creating and configuring OCI Security services. This exam format consists of 2 HPE challenges and 25 multiple-choice questions (MCQs). You’ll have 90 minutes to complete the exam, with a passing percentage of 65%.

OCI 2024 Security Professional Exam

 

Before taking the exam, be sure to explore the Exam Prep section. This resource is intended to help you effectively prepare for the HPE by providing discussions on 7 scenarios/challenges. These scenarios aim to give you confidence to successfully handle the exam’s challenges.

Since this certification includes a Hands-on Performance Exam (HPE), so practical learning is important. To enhance your practical skills, we’ve added 17 hands-on labs to the course, specifically designed to strengthen your practical understanding of OCI security services.

You can practice them in Oracle University’s self-paced lab environment, which is pre-configured and includes all necessary permissions.

Get started today

Get started on your journey by checking out the following:

We hope you will find the updated course useful and informative. We constantly improve our training based on user feedback and data to better serve you.  So your feedback is valuable to us! Please take a moment to rate the course and provide detailed feedback. Your feedback will help us understand what we’re doing well and where we need to improve.

Thank you for reading, and best of luck with the course and certification exam!