How long do you study for AWS Certified Security – Specialty?

The vendor recommends approximately 100 hours of preparation.

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AWS Certified Security – Specialty

About this Certification

Specialty certification validating deep expertise in AWS security services, data protection, identity management, and compliance. Covers incident response, logging, monitoring, and encryption strategies on AWS.

Work Areas

Cloud AWS Security Specialty

Prerequisites

Recommended: 5 years IT security experience, 2+ years AWS security experience

Reviews (4)

Only verified reviews

Editorial summary— Aggregated from public sources, not a verified user review

Sources (1)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/

Aggregated from SCS exam-strategy threads

Does not count toward average ratings or recommendation %.

@Gerhard4mo1st attempt

May 10, 2026

Recommends

HR Value

Worth Cost

Learning

Exam Difficulty

Specialty-tier exam = 65 questions / 170 minutes, multi-paragraph scenarios. Heavy focus on incident response runbooks (CloudTrail forensics, GuardDuty triage). Recurring tip: practice analyzing real CloudTrail logs, not just memorizing event types.

🎯New project / client

Helpful?

Editorial summary— Aggregated from public sources, not a verified user review

Sources (1)

https://www.reddit.com/r/AWSCertifications/

Aggregated from "AWS SCS vs CCSP" threads

Does not count toward average ratings or recommendation %.

@Gerhard3mo2nd attempt

May 10, 2026

Recommends

HR Value

Worth Cost

Learning

Exam Difficulty

$300 fee, $150 recert at 3 years. Compared to AZ-500, SCS goes deeper on individual services but covers narrower feature surface. For AWS-shop security engineers, SCS is more applicable than CCSP.

🚀Got a promotion

Helpful?

Editorial summary— Aggregated from public sources, not a verified user review

Sources (2)

Aggregated from SCS prep threads

Does not count toward average ratings or recommendation %.

@Gerhard3mo1st attempt

May 10, 2026

Recommends

HR Value

Worth Cost

Learning

Exam Difficulty

Adrian Cantrill's SCS course + Tutorials Dojo SCS-C02 practice exams the universal 2024 prep stack. Most pass after SAA + 6+ months hands-on AWS security work. Pure prep without AWS tenant access very difficult.

💼Got a new job

Helpful?

Editorial summary— Aggregated from public sources, not a verified user review

Sources (2)

Aggregated from r/AWSCertifications SCS threads

Does not count toward average ratings or recommendation %.

@Gerhard3mo1st attempt

May 10, 2026

Recommends

HR Value

Worth Cost

Learning

Exam Difficulty

AWS's flagship security cert. Deep coverage: KMS, IAM (advanced), GuardDuty, Inspector, Macie, Security Hub, VPC security, log forensics. Strong HR signal for AWS security engineering / cloud security architect roles.

💰Salary increase

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