Yesterday, I passed the PCNSA exam.
I previously did the PCCSA/PCCET exam, which was more of a general overview about security concepts and the Palo Alto product range. By contrast, the PCNSA is more practical, so it’s aimed at people who do hands-on tasks with a Palo Alto firewall. In particular, it’s mostly focussed on PAN-OS, with a bit of Panorama; the other cloud-based services (e.g. Prisma) have separate certifications.
(more…)I did my first (vocational) IT exam in 1999. This was after an annual appraisal from my (then) manager, who said “I’ve spoken to lots of people, and they’re all very impressed with your work. However, there’s no way for me to quantify your performance, so you don’t get a pay rise.” Based on that, I decided that it would be useful to have some objective evidence of my abilities from a neutral 3rd party, so I took the Visual Basic 5.0 exam and became a Microsoft Certified Professional.
Fast forward to 2023: I’ve now passed 41 exams and earned 50 certifications. In all honesty, this process has been a bit haphazard; I’ve picked certifications based on what looked interesting at the time, or what related to a skill I’d been using at work, rather than having a clear roadmap of where I wanted my career to go. I’ve also sometimes leant towards the Pokémon approach of “gotta collect them all!” So, I think it’s time to look back and review which of these were worthwhile, and which I’d recommend to other people.
NB I’m not including my university degrees in this list, because they’re academic rather than vocational. I’m also not including the European Computer Driving License (ECDL), because that’s aimed at end users rather than IT professionals.
(more…)Palo Alto Networks make security products. In particular, they sell firewalls (physical and virtual), and their Panorama software will let you manage multiple firewalls centrally (e.g. for branch offices). Their certification program has 3 tiers:
Palo Alto Networks offer free training for all of these, although you have to pay for the exam. Even if you don’t do the exam, the training might be worthwhile on its own merits.
In December 2019, I took the entry level exam. At the time, that was the Palo Alto Networks Certified Cybersecurity Associate (PCCSA). However, that exam is being retired at the end of this month (2021-01-31), to be replaced by the Palo Alto Networks Certified Cybersecurity Entry-level Technician (PCCET). This is basically a rebranding exercise; I assume that it was confusing to have “Associate” (PCCSA) and “Administrator” (PCNSA) certifications which both ended with an A. According to the FAQ: “PCCSA certified individuals will have their credentialing status grandfathered into the upgraded PCCET certification framework.” The syllabus has been revised at the same time, to keep it up to date, but it looks much the same as before.
In brief, this exam is “what” rather than “how”, i.e. it’s all about the concepts rather than the implementation. In that respect, it’s quite similar to Microsoft 365 Fundamentals, and both exams are a similar price ($100/£70). When I did the training, the videos were about 50% advertising for Palo Alto Networks products; the pdf (ebook) was a bit more restrained, but there was still quite a bit of marketing/advocacy in there. E.g. the course will describe what WildFire and GlobalProtect are used for, but not how to configure them. By contrast, the exam was much more general, so there was a lot of overlap between this, Security+, and the SSCP.
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