Chapter 1: Preparing for Your Microsoft Exam and SC-200 Objectives

Welcome to Microsoft SC-200 Exam Prep and Beyond and Chapter 1, Preparing for Your Microsoft Exam and SC-200 Objectives. This chapter is dedicated to ensuring that you are ready for the Microsoft SC-200 exam and that you fully understand the objectives, along with how they apply in the real world. It's one thing to pass an exam but a whole other thing to apply exam topics to your day-to-day job. Let's get into it!

In both traditional and modern enterprises, the Microsoft security operations analyst is the key pivot point and collaborator with both individual contributors and enterprise stakeholders. This role in most organizations has one goal in mind – to protect against, secure against, detect, and respond to threats present in an enterprise as expeditiously as possible. They are responsible for reducing organizational risk by rapidly remediating active attacks in the environment, advising on improvements to threat protection practices, and referring violations of organizational policies to appropriate teams and stakeholders. Historically, this level of responsibility came with a lot of tooling, alert fatigue, manual or human interaction in investigations, and so on.

What we hope to make clear is that there has been a massive evolution of security operations for most enterprises. Tooling has changed, and the power of the cloud has added great value to tools that Security Operations Team (SOC) analysts are required to use day to day to successfully deliver in the Microsoft security operations analyst position for enterprises today.

This chapter will cover the following topics to get us started:

• Preparing for a Microsoft exam
• Introducing the resources available and accessing Microsoft Learn
• Creating a Microsoft demo tenant

It is important to note that in November 21 some Microsoft Security Services have been renamed. These are renamed as follows:

• Microsoft Cloud App Security (MCAS) is now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps
• System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM) is now called Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager (MECM)
• Azure Sentinel is now called Microsoft Sentinel
• Azure defender is now Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Azure Security Center is now called Microsoft Defender for Cloud
• Playbook is now called Workflow automation