I recently passed the AWS Certified Security – Specialty (SCS-C02) exam, and I wanted to share my experience in case it helps anyone else on the same path.
📚 Study Journey
I first started studying with Zeal Vora's course on Udemy back in September 2024. It gave me a solid foundation, but work got hectic, and I had to pause.
Earlier this year, I got back into it with Stephane Maarek’s SCS-C02 course — it was a fantastic refresher and only 16 hours long. I also started working through Tutorial Dojo’s practice exams, which were incredibly useful for simulating the real exam format.
All in all, I spent around 80–100 hours studying and playing lightly in AWS.
🧠 What Helped the Most
- Taking notes after each failed question
- Reviewing explanations, not just answers
- Practicing with an AWS account (light console usage helped a lot)
- Focusing on IAM, STS, Organizations, and logging-related services
🔍 What the Exam Felt Like
The real exam had a strong focus on:
- AWS Organizations
- CloudFront
- Fleet management and IAM structure
Some topics like CloudHSM didn’t appear at all. But honestly, almost everything I studied showed up in one form or another.
Time was manageable — I finished with around 10 minutes to spare.
🎓 Final Advice
- Pick one course and finish it fully before jumping to exams
- Practice exams are not optional — they are essential
- Don’t just memorize — try to understand what the service does and why you’d use it that way
📫 I write about cloud security, automation, and best practices at The Hidden Port.
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Top comments (4)
Great read Javier. I was thinking about getting this specialty cert later on as I’m interested in security in the cloud as well. I have my security plus cert but want this as well.
Hey Keenan!
Thank you for your comment. It truly is a great certification, it offers great security knowledge across a lot of services.
Not going to lie, it is a tough one (at least it was for me) but I felt it was fair.
I encourage you to check Reddit AWScertifications subreddit; there’s ton of guides there that will help you.
Good luck!
I want to get certeficate
What certificate are you interested in? You can check the available ones here
aws.amazon.com/en/certification/#c...