PCCSE study guide
PCCSE · Work through your exam, one topic at a time.
The Prisma Certified Cloud Security Engineer (PCCSE) is a vendor credential for security engineers who design, deploy, and operate Prisma Cloud across cloud accounts, workloads, and the software delivery pipeline. It targets practitioners with hands-on familiarity with cloud-native security - cloud security posture management, cloud infrastructure entitlement management, cloud workload protection, and code and infrastructure-as-code scanning - rather than candidates who only know terminology. The PCCSE study guide has 7 sections and about 1,918 words.
01Prisma Cloud Overview and Architecture
This domain checks whether you can describe how Prisma Cloud is assembled and how its parts communicate. You must distinguish the SaaS Cloud Console, which handles posture, code, and platform administration, from the Compute Console, which handles runtime workload protection.
283 words, about 1 min02Onboarding Cloud Accounts and Cloud-Native Security
This domain tests how you connect cloud environments to Prisma Cloud and how you organize them for visibility. Expect questions on read-only onboarding, account groups, organization-level onboarding, and the difference between a cloud account and an account group.
295 words, about 1 min03Policy Configuration and Management
This domain tests how Prisma Cloud policies are built, grouped, and applied. You need to know policy types, policy sets, compliance standards, and how custom config policies use Resource Query Language (RQL).
292 words, about 1 min04Monitoring, Alerts, and Investigation
This domain tests how alerts are generated, routed, and investigated. You need to know alert rules, notification channels, alert states, and how investigators use RQL and asset context to triage issues.
268 words, about 1 min05Compute Security (Host, Container, Serverless)
This domain tests Prisma Cloud Compute controls for hosts, containers, and serverless functions. You need to know Defender deployment, runtime policies, vulnerability scanning, admission control, and serverless protection.
251 words, about 1 min06Code Security and CI/CD Integration
This domain tests how Prisma Cloud Code Security scans infrastructure as code, repositories, and secrets, and how CI/CD integrations enforce build policies. You need to know where scanning happens and how failures reach developers.
269 words, about 1 min07Platform Administration (RBAC, Enterprise Groups, Integrations)
This domain tests administration of users, roles, scoping, single sign-on, and integrations. You need to know how RBAC and enterprise groups limit visibility and how integrations connect Prisma Cloud to other systems.
260 words, about 1 min