I recently passed the INE Certified Cloud Associate (ICCA) exam with a score of 95%. In this post I will review the exam material and the exam.
I must preface that I am not an absolute beginner when it comes to Cloud technology, having some experience from my college course.
The course material and exam voucher cost $99 USD. I got both with the Fundamental's Annual plan.
Course material
The course material is relatively short when compared to other certifications. However that makes sense considering that ICCA is focused towards cloud beginners.
The course is around 16 hours long with 9 labs included. These labs are what made the course worth it in my opinion as you could test your hands on the top three vendors' (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud) dashboards. There are some terms and conditions that you have to accept which are well within reason.
The instructor Tracey Wallace explains cloud concepts well without overwhelming the listener with overly sophisticated terms.
I would suggest you to take extensive notes for the exam as there is a lot of information in the course.
Exam
The exam duration is 1 hour 30 minnutes, which is quite short. INE offers timers that can be set to alert the user after a certain time interval.
As for the questions, there are 46 theory question divided into three domains:
- Cloud Concepts
- Cloud Services
- Cloud Security and Regulatory Compliance
There are also 4 practical questions that are to be solved in the exam lab.
Passing requirements
For passing the overall required grade is 75% which is further divided as follows:
Theory
- Cloud Concepts: 72%
- Cloud Services: 75%
- Cloud Security and Regulatory Compliance: 65%
Practical
- 2 questions correctly answered out of 4.
Parting thoughts
Overall, I would say that the exam is worth it if you get in the Fundamentals plan along with the eJPT. I would not spend $99 USD just to get this certification. I believe you'd be better off getting a vendor specific certification from Azure (AZ-500 / SC-100) or AWS (AWS Certified Security - Specialty). Speaking of the eJPT, that is the next certification that I'll be going for.