Just Passed the Google Professional Security Operations Exam: Here's What You Need to Know
Hello, fellow security professionals and Google Cloud enthusiasts!
After anxiously awaiting the results, I just received a congratulatory email informing me that I’ve successfully completed Google’s new Professional Security Operations Engineer (PSOE) certification. It was a long and winding road of studying and preparing, but I had a great experience overall and it was well worth the effort. Having somewhat recently passed the Google Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam, there are some slight similarities as well as some very distinct differences, and I would not recommend planning to rely solely on your PCSE prep to attempt the PSOE.
While exams like the Professional Cloud Security Engineer (PCSE) focus on designing and implementing secure workloads within the broader Google Cloud ecosystem (covering services like IAM, VPC firewalls, and Workforce Identity Federation (WIF)), the Professional Security Operations Engineer exam is a deep dive into the specific domain of security operations.
This isn't just another exam about securing a general cloud environment. It's about a specific, powerful, and relatively new family of products that are the evolution of Google's acquisitions of Chronicle and Siemplify. The core of this exam is Google Security Operations (SecOps), which is Google's all-encompassing SIEM and SOAR platform.
Let's break down what this exam is and how it's different.
The Shift from "Build" to "Operate"
The Professional Cloud Security Engineer exam is about building the security fortress. You're the architect, the designer, the one who lays the foundation and ensures the structure is sound. The content is generally framing you as the practitioner in various situations to test your ability to find the most optimal solutions. You're tested on your ability to configure IAM roles, set up robust network perimeters with Cloud Armor, and use Security Command Center to identify misconfigurations and threats.
The Professional Security Operations Engineer exam, however, is about being on the front lines, inside the fortress you've already built. You're the one on watch, constantly monitoring, hunting for threats, and responding to alerts. This exam is focused on the day-to-day work of a Security Operations Center (SOC) analyst or engineer.
Key Domains of the Exam
The exam guide breaks down the content into six main domains, and this is where the difference becomes the most clear.
6 domains of the Google Cloud Professional Security Operations Engineer cert
- Platform Operations: This is all about the foundational work of managing the SecOps platform itself. Think about configuring the environment, managing users, and ensuring the platform is running optimally.
- Data Management: How do you get your logs into Google SecOps? This section focuses on log ingestion, normalization, and ensuring you have the right telemetry to perform your analysis.
- Threat Hunting: The exam will test your ability to proactively search for threats using the YARA-L language and Google Security Operations' suite of cloud security tools.
- Detection Engineering: Moving beyond hunting, this domain is about building and implementing the rules that proactively detect threats. It's a key part of the modern security operations workflow.
- Incident Response: When an alert fires, what do you do? This section covers the full lifecycle of incident response within the SecOps platform, from case management to building and using automated response playbooks. SOAR automation will be a core component of this domain.
- Observability: The final piece is about visualizing your security posture. You'll be tested on your ability to build dashboards and reports to provide insights into your environment.
Notice how these domains are tightly coupled with the features of Google Security Operations.
Where PCSE exam is broad, PSOE is deep. It's designed to validate the SOC-level mastery of Google SecOps.
Chronicle, Siemplify, and Google Threat Intelligence
You can't talk about PSOE without its core components. Google's acquisition of Mandiant, Chronicle, and Siemplify has revolutionized security operations and this exam highlights that integration.
- SIEM (Chronicle → SecOps): The core of the exam. You will be tested on your proficiency with the capabilities of SecOps SIEM. Focusing on UDM (Unified Data Model) Search, data ingestion capabilities, and the YARA-L language.
- SOAR (Siemplify → SecOps): The orchestration and automation portion of the exam directly comes from the integration of the Siemplify platform which is now referred to as SOAR within Google SecOps. You will need to know how to build and execute playbooks to automate incident response tasks.
- Threat Intelligence (Virus Total + Mandiant Advantage → SecOps & Google Threat Intelligence) : The exam also heavily features Google's threat intelligence feeds, demonstrating how to use them for both threat hunting and detection.
The exam highlights how these services, combined with other Google Cloud tools like Security Command Center, form a comprehensive security operations solution. It's not just a collection of services, but rather a cohesive platform.
Chronicle + Siemplify + GTI = Google SecOps
My Preparation Tips
Here's my advice if you're preparing to take this exam:
- Get hands-on with Google Security Operations. This is non-negotiable. While you can study the concepts, the exam is practical and will test your ability to perform tasks within the platform's context. The exam is not about generic security principles; it's about applying those principles using specific Google SecOps features.
- CloudSkillsBoost Learning Path: This certification has a designated learning path (Professional Security Operations Engineer Learning Path) within the CloudSkillsBoost platform. Completing the entire path would certainly be beneficial, but at a minimum, I would recommend completing all courses and labs that have content that you don’t have hands-on experience with. The lab environments are an amazing resource that feel much easier to use and more responsive than most comparable lab environments that I’ve used personally.
- Focus on the YARA-L language. You don't need to be a developer, but you must understand how to read, interpret, and write YARA-L detection rules. This is a foundational skill for detection engineering on this platform. It is also a necessary skill for analysts who are triaging and investigating alerts to be able to understand why a detection was triggered based on the log(s) and what the rule is attempting to detect.
I would consider these links to be essential study material for YARA-L:
- Understand the incident response lifecycle. Be familiar with how cases are managed, how alerts are correlated, and how playbooks are used to automate responses.
- Don't assume your Professional Cloud Security Engineer knowledge is enough. While there's some overlap with services like Security Command Center, the context is completely different. The PCSE focuses on configuring SCC, while the PSOE focuses on operating it.
The new Google Professional Security Operations Engineer certification is a true professional-level exam that validates expertise in a highly specialized and in-demand area of cybersecurity. It's challenging, but for anyone looking to validate their knowledge and experience in the world of modern security operations, this is the one to get. Good luck! 🤜🤛
Ready to Learn from the Experts?
Here at Foresite, we are a Google-only, security-first partner. We've delivered hundreds of Google Security Operations deployments, and have been hands-on with Chronicle since the beginning, and we're ready to share our knowledge with you.
We are kickstarting a series of blog posts written by the very engineers who operate and deploy in Google SecOps every day. We'll be covering each section of the exam in detail, providing hands-on advice, and sharing insights from real-world deployments. Stay tuned.
Official Prep Resources
- Exam Guide: Get the official breakdown of the topics covered in the exam.
- Learning Community: Join the conversation, ask questions, and connect with other professionals preparing for the exam.
- Sample Questions: Get a feel for the exam format and question style with these sample questions.
Want to join a certified Google SecOps team? Explore careers at Foresite →