INE Certified Cloud Associate (ICCA) — Exam Review

4 min readJan 5, 2024

How I passed my ICCA Certification Exam

INE Certified Cloud Associate

Greetings, Cyber Mavericks!

In this article, I’ll share my recent experience passing the INE ICCA exam, offering insights, tips, and the resources I utilized.

The INE Certified Cloud Associate certification serves as an entry-level accreditation, providing a comprehensive overview of fundamental cloud computing principles.

What sets this certification apart is its vendor-neutral approach, steering clear of tying candidates to a single provider like AWS or Azure.
Instead, the course covers general cloud concepts and their implementation across the three major cloud platforms:

Amazon (AWS)
Microsoft (Azure)
Google (GCP)

As one of the few, if not the only, entry-level multi-cloud courses with both theoretical and hands-on components, it covers essential concepts and practical aspects across the three leading cloud providers.

The goal is not to make you a cloud expert but to equip you with the foundational knowledge you need to understand cloud concepts, security considerations, services, different deployment and service models.

Upon completion, you won’t feel completely adrift when your IT or DevOps colleagues discuss “cloud stuff” during your next meeting. 😄

Course Overview

The ICCA course includes hands-on labs, quizzes, and videos to prepare you for the exam and other real-world applications. It is a well-structured course and has a very logical flow of the different cloud concepts covered.

The topics covered are:

Cloud Basics
Cloud Deployment Models
Cloud Management
Cloud Shared Responsibility Model
Cloud Services & Providers
Cloud Identity & Access Management (IAM)

A screenshot of how the learning path is structured on a high level can be seen below.

Exam Details

Time: 1.5 hours
Questions: 46 (Multiple Choice)
Labs: 4 hands-on labs
Mode: Open book

Theory portion

To pass the ICCA exam, you need to answer 46 questions with an overall score of 70%, of which you need a minimum required score for each of the following domains:

Cloud Concepts (min. 72%)
Cloud Services (min. 75%)
Cloud Security & Regulatory Compliance (min. 65%)

Practical portion

To pass the practical portion of the exam you need the following:

Labs are hands-on and you have 4 required actions to perform in a cloud environment.
You need a minimum of 2 labs out of a total of 4 labs to pass the practical part of the exam.

Below is a screenshot of how your exam results would look like after completion.

Use the below topics as a high-level guideline for the required objectives.

Pros & Cons

Pros

Short course (16h) compared to other INE courses (eJPTv2 is 156h!).
ICCA now includes free access to AWS/Azure/GCP to practice the labs.
Tracy Wallace is a highly knowledgeable and engaging instructor with a great sense of humour. You won’t get bored of him.
The course effectively guides you from a basic to a solid understanding of foundational cloud knowledge.
Additionally, the open-book exam allows you to refer to your notes or cloud provider documentation.

Cons

The included slides lack substantial material coverage, with approximately 80% of the content being verbally explained and presented on a whiteboard by Tracy Wallace.
Consequently, a concerted effort is needed to actively listen and meticulously note down the crucial concepts he explains.
Some questions in the exam caught me off guard, and I couldn’t recall them being covered in the course material. Fortunately, my preparation involved going through supplementary resources, which proved beneficial, along with consulting the appropriate vendor documentation.

Tips

Thoroughly study the course material. It’s a short course but do not fall into the trap of underestimating it.
Take detailed notes of each lecture and pay attention to the instructor.
Supplement your studies with additional resources, particularly consulting the documentation and websites of major cloud providers; This will be key in the exam.
The crucial part of the course and exam depends on your full understanding of the “Cloud Shared Responsibility Model” for IaaS, PaaS and SaaS. It is key. Devote ample time to studying this concept.
The exam labs are AWS-based. Ensure you practised the three AWS labs extensively and you will breeze through the lab section of the exam.
As always, when taking an open-book exam, have all your resources and notes ready before starting, as time is limited on this exam
️️️️This tip might save you from a grave error:
Once you have completed the labs on the exam, submit them on the exam window.
⚠️ DO NOT terminate your exam lab cloud instance as INE will validate and grade your lab assignment

Resources

💡 I highly recommend you read the NIST Cloud Computing Definition in full

Good luck with your exam, Maverick!

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Happy Hacking!

CyberSecMaverick