Certification glossary

A family of IEEE standards defining wireless LAN communication protocols, with amendments (a/b/g/n/ac/ax) specifying different frequencies, speeds, and features.

A family of IEEE wireless networking standards defining Wi-Fi communication protocols, with variants such as 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax.

An IEEE standard that inserts a 4-byte tag into Ethernet frames to identify VLAN membership across trunk links.

An IEEE standard for port-based network access control that authenticates devices and users before granting access to the network.

Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service used to authenticate and authorize users and applications.

The realized cost incurred for work performed on an activity during a specific time period.

The realized cost incurred for work performed on a project activity during a specific time period.

Mechanisms and policies that restrict system access to authorized users, processes, or devices based on defined roles and permissions.

A set of transaction properties that guarantee database operations are processed reliably, ensuring data integrity even during failures.

An ordered set of permit or deny rules applied to a router interface to filter traffic based on IP addresses, protocols, or ports.

The permission model used in Vault policies; capabilities such as create, read, update, delete, and list are granted per path.

A set of rules associated with a resource or network device that specifies which users or traffic are permitted or denied.

An extended permission mechanism that allows fine-grained read, write, and execute rights to be assigned to specific users or groups beyond standard POSIX permissions.

A set of rules applied to a router or firewall interface that permits or denies traffic based on defined criteria such as source IP, destination IP, or port.

An extended permission mechanism allowing fine-grained file access rights beyond standard owner/group/other POSIX permissions.

A set of rules in ServiceNow that controls read, write, create, or delete access to tables and fields based on roles and conditions.

A managed Docker-compatible registry for storing, managing, and deploying container images and Helm charts.

One or more isolated, fault-independent data centers within an OCI region that do not share power or cooling.

A one-line Ansible command run directly from the CLI to execute a single module on managed hosts without writing a playbook.

One of three Scrum pillars requiring that if any aspect of a process deviates outside acceptable limits, the process or material must be adjusted.

A fully managed Oracle Database service optimized for analytics and data warehouse workloads.

A symmetric block cipher adopted by NIST, supporting 128-, 192-, and 256-bit key lengths, widely used for data encryption.

The process of summarizing measure values using functions like SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, or COUNT at the view's level of detail.

An iterative approach to project delivery that emphasizes collaboration, customer feedback, and small, rapid releases over rigid upfront planning.

An iterative, incremental project delivery approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and customer feedback over rigid planning.

An iterative and incremental project management approach that emphasizes flexibility, collaboration, and delivering value in short cycles.

A 2001 document signed by 17 practitioners that defines four values and twelve principles underpinning Agile software development.

The simulation of human-like intelligence by machines to perform tasks such as reasoning, learning, and problem-solving.

A managed Kubernetes container orchestration service that offloads cluster control-plane management to Azure.

A managed Kubernetes container orchestration service in Azure that simplifies cluster deployment, scaling, and operations.

A managed Kubernetes container orchestration service that offloads cluster control-plane management to Azure.

Expected monetary loss for an asset due to a specific risk over a one-year period; calculated as SLE × ARO.

A persistent Databricks cluster that remains running and can be shared among multiple users for interactive development and ad hoc analysis.

Pre-configured template containing the OS, application software, and configuration required to launch an EC2 instance.

An agentless IT automation tool by Red Hat that uses SSH to configure systems, deploy applications, and orchestrate tasks via YAML-based playbooks.

An agentless IT automation tool that uses SSH or APIs with YAML playbooks to configure systems and network devices.

The primary Ansible configuration file where settings such as inventory path, remote user, and privilege escalation are defined.

A GCP platform for managing and deploying applications consistently across on-premises, GCP, and other cloud environments.

Open-source unified programming model for defining portable batch and streaming data processing pipelines.

Salesforce's proprietary, Java-like programming language used to write custom business logic executed on the platform.

Salesforce's proprietary, strongly typed, object-oriented programming language that executes on the Force.com platform server side.

A defined interface that allows software components to communicate by exposing functions, data, or services to external consumers.

Managed service for creating, publishing, and securing REST, HTTP, and WebSocket APIs at any scale.

A managed service for publishing, securing, transforming, and monitoring APIs exposed to internal or external consumers.

A feature that allows a host to self-assign an IP address in the 169.254.0.0/16 range when no DHCP server is reachable.

A feature on Windows hosts that self-assigns an address in the 169.254.0.0/16 range when a DHCP server cannot be reached.

A collection of tabs, objects, reports, and other components assembled to support a specific business function.

An Azure resource that defines the region, compute size, and pricing tier for hosting one or more App Service web apps.

Palo Alto Networks traffic classification technology that identifies applications using signatures, decryption, and behavioral analysis regardless of port or protocol.

A Palo Alto Networks technology that identifies applications traversing the firewall regardless of port, protocol, or encryption.

A FortiGate security profile that identifies and enforces policy on network applications using deep packet inspection signatures.

An APM service within Azure Monitor that collects telemetry including requests, exceptions, dependencies, and custom metrics from applications.

A machine-oriented Vault auth method that uses a Role ID and Secret ID pair to authenticate non-human workloads.

A prolonged, targeted cyberattack in which an adversary gains and maintains unauthorized access to a network, often for espionage or data theft.

The deployment and management layer for Azure that provides a consistent way to create, update, and delete resources using templates or APIs.

The deployment and management layer for Azure that provides a consistent API for creating, updating, and deleting resources.

Azure's deployment and management layer that provides a consistent API for creating, updating, and deleting resources across Azure subscriptions.

A JSON file that declaratively defines Azure infrastructure and configuration for repeatable deployments.

Estimated frequency with which a specific threat is expected to occur within a one-year period.

A Layer 2/3 protocol that resolves a known IPv4 address to its corresponding MAC address within the same broadcast domain.

An attack that sends forged ARP replies to associate the attacker's MAC address with a legitimate IP address on a LAN.

A logical grouping of VM network interfaces that simplifies NSG rule management by allowing rules to reference groups instead of individual IPs.

Fortinet's purpose-built hardware chips (e.g., NP and CP processors) that accelerate firewall, VPN, and content-inspection functions.

A unique number assigned to an autonomous system for use in BGP routing to identify and distinguish routing domains.

A fully managed Oracle Database service optimized for OLTP workloads with automated tuning, patching, and scaling.

The total set of points on a system or network where an unauthorized user could attempt to enter or extract data.

A scalar metric summarizing a binary classifier's ability to discriminate between classes across all decision thresholds; ranges from 0 to 1.

A formal document that defines the purpose, authority, scope, and responsibilities of the internal audit function within an organization.

A Vault component that logs all authenticated requests and responses to a persistent backend (file, syslog, or socket) for compliance and forensics.

Information gathered by an auditor through observation, inquiry, inspection, or analysis used to support audit findings and conclusions.

Salesforce's older client-side JavaScript framework for building dynamic Lightning components, now superseded in preference by LWC.

An Amazon Aurora feature that replicates data across up to five AWS regions with typical replication lag under one second for disaster recovery.

A Vault component responsible for authenticating clients and returning a token; examples include AppRole, AWS, Kubernetes, and LDAP.

A Databricks structured streaming source that incrementally and efficiently ingests new files from cloud object storage as they arrive.

Service that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in a group based on demand or a defined schedule.

AWS feature that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances in a group based on demand or defined schedules.

An AWS capability that automatically adjusts the number of compute resources (EC2, ECS tasks, DynamoDB capacity) based on demand or scheduled policies.

An AWS feature that automatically adjusts the number of EC2 instances or other resources based on defined scaling policies.

A Vault feature that delegates master key unsealing to a trusted external key management service (e.g., AWS KMS, Azure Key Vault) instead of manual key shares.

The automatic conversion by the Java compiler between primitive types (e.g., int) and their corresponding wrapper classes (e.g., Integer).

A service that automatically mounts file systems on demand when accessed and unmounts them after a period of inactivity.

Databricks AutoML automatically trains and tunes multiple models on a dataset, generating Python notebooks with the best-found configurations.

Vertex AI capability that automates model selection and hyperparameter tuning for users with limited ML expertise.

Physically separate datacenter locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking to protect against datacenter-level failures.

Physically separate datacenter locations within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking to protect against datacenter failures.

Physically separate datacenters within an Azure region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking to protect against datacenter failure.

An AWS managed firewall service that filters malicious web traffic using customizable rules before it reaches applications.

A set of AWS best practices organized into six pillars—operational excellence, security, reliability, performance efficiency, cost optimization, and sustainability.

One or more discrete data centers within an AWS Region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking to provide fault isolation.

One or more discrete, isolated data centers within an AWS Region, each with independent power, cooling, and networking.

Microsoft's public cloud platform offering compute, storage, networking, and other services via Microsoft-owned datacenters worldwide.

Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service used for authentication and authorization of users and applications.

Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service used to authenticate users and control access to Azure and other Microsoft services.

Microsoft's cloud-based identity and access management service used to authenticate users and control access to Azure resources and applications.

An Azure service that uses ML to extract structured data such as fields, tables, and key-value pairs from documents and forms.

An Azure platform for building, evaluating, and deploying generative AI applications and custom AI solutions in a unified environment.

An Azure service providing NLP features including sentiment analysis, key phrase extraction, entity recognition, and question answering.

An Azure service that converts speech to text, text to speech, and performs speaker recognition and translation.

An Azure Cognitive Service that analyzes images and videos to extract descriptions, tags, objects, and text.

A fully managed PaaS service providing secure RDP and SSH connectivity to VMs directly through the Azure portal without exposing public IP addresses.

An Azure object storage service optimized for storing large amounts of unstructured data such as images, videos, and backups.

A service that packages ARM templates, policies, role assignments, and resource groups into a repeatable, auditable definition for consistent environment provisioning.

An Azure service for building, connecting, and deploying intelligent conversational bots across multiple channels.

A globally distributed, multi-model NoSQL database service with single-digit millisecond latency, automatic scaling, and multiple consistency level options.

A set of threat protection plans within Microsoft Defender for Cloud that detects and responds to advanced threats across Azure, hybrid, and multi-cloud workloads.

A set of threat protection plans within Microsoft Defender for Cloud that monitors and detects threats across Azure and hybrid workloads.

A global, scalable entry point that uses Microsoft's edge network to deliver fast, secure, and highly available web applications with built-in load balancing and WAF.

A serverless compute service that executes event-driven code without requiring explicit infrastructure management.

A cloud service for securely storing and controlling access to secrets, encryption keys, and certificates used by applications and services.

An Azure cloud service for building, training, deploying, and managing machine learning models at scale.

A platform service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments to maximize performance and availability.

A comprehensive monitoring service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments.

An Azure service that collects, analyzes, and acts on telemetry data from Azure and on-premises environments to maximize performance and availability.

An Azure service that provides access to OpenAI large language models, including GPT-4, with enterprise security and compliance.

A governance service that creates, assigns, and manages policy definitions to enforce rules and effects on Azure resources at scale.

A governance service that creates, assigns, and manages policy definitions to enforce organizational rules and compliance standards on Azure resources.

An Azure service that creates, assigns, and manages policy definitions to enforce organizational standards and assess compliance.

A set of datacenters deployed within a latency-defined perimeter, connected via a dedicated low-latency regional network.

A disaster recovery service that orchestrates replication, failover, and recovery of Azure VMs and on-premises workloads to a secondary location.

The total authorized budget for the project or work component, representing the total planned value.

An ongoing activity in which the Product Owner and team review, estimate, and detail Product Backlog items to prepare them for future Sprints.

An ongoing activity in which the Product Owner and Developers add detail, estimates, and order to Product Backlog Items.

The ongoing activity of breaking down and further defining Product Backlog items into smaller, more precise items; not an official Scrum event.

The approved version of a project plan component (scope, schedule, or cost) used as a reference for measuring performance.

The approved version of a scope, schedule, or cost plan that can be changed only through formal change control procedures.

An asynchronous Apex interface (Database.Batchable) that processes large data sets in configurable chunks to avoid governor limits.

Running a trained model against a large dataset all at once using Spark or pandas, writing predictions back to storage rather than serving live requests.

A documented plan that enables an organization to maintain critical functions during and after a disruptive event.

A plan that enables critical business functions to continue during and after a disruptive event.

A documented strategy that enables an organization to maintain or quickly resume critical business functions during and after a disruptive event.

A documented plan outlining procedures to maintain essential business functions during and after a disruptive event.

Documented plan for maintaining essential business functions during and after a disaster or significant disruption.

A path-vector exterior gateway routing protocol defined in RFC 4271 used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems on the internet.

A path-vector exterior gateway routing protocol used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems, supported on PAN-OS.

A path-vector routing protocol used by FortiOS to exchange routing information between autonomous systems, commonly used with SD-WAN and ISPs.

The standard exterior routing protocol used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems, required for Direct Connect and VPN configurations on AWS.

A path-vector exterior gateway protocol used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems on the internet.

A path-vector exterior routing protocol configurable on FortiGate for peering with ISPs or in SD-WAN overlay designs.

An exterior gateway protocol supported on Palo Alto Networks firewalls to exchange routing information with external autonomous systems.

A path-vector EGP used to exchange routing information between autonomous systems on the internet and in enterprise networks.

A process that identifies critical business functions and quantifies the effect of disruptions on those functions.

A fully managed, serverless data warehouse on GCP that enables SQL analytics over large datasets.

A fully managed, serverless data warehouse optimized for large-scale analytical SQL queries using columnar storage.

Fully managed, serverless data warehouse on GCP that enables fast SQL analytics over large datasets using columnar storage.

Fully managed wide-column NoSQL database on GCP optimised for low-latency, high-throughput workloads at petabyte scale.

Legacy firmware stored on a motherboard chip that initializes hardware and loads the bootloader during startup.

Unstructured object storage in Azure Storage optimized for storing large amounts of text or binary data such as images, videos, and backups.

Azure object storage service for unstructured data such as images, videos, logs, and backups.

A logical grouping of tasks in a playbook that allows shared directives, error handling via rescue, and cleanup via always.

OCI persistent block storage service that provides network-attached storage volumes for compute instances.

A deployment strategy that runs two identical environments and shifts traffic from the old version to the new version.

The practice of writing Apex code to handle collections of records at once rather than processing records individually, to respect governor limits.

A graphical representation showing remaining work versus time within an iteration or release, used to track progress toward completion.

A server-side script in ServiceNow that executes automatically when a record is displayed, inserted, updated, or deleted.

Software tools and techniques used by auditors to perform audit procedures directly on electronic data and systems.

Microsoft's documented guidance and best practices covering the full lifecycle of cloud adoption, including strategy, planning, governance, and operations.

A user-defined field created using Tableau's formula editor that computes new data from existing fields or constants.

A user-defined field created by writing a formula in Tableau to derive new data from existing fields.

An Apex HTTP or web service request made to an external endpoint from within a Salesforce transaction.

A temporary, editable copy of the device configuration in Junos that must be committed before changes take effect on the active configuration.

Upfront spending on physical infrastructure such as servers and datacenters, depreciated over time on a company's balance sheet.

Upfront spending on physical infrastructure owned by an organization, contrasted with the OpEx model used in cloud computing.

A formally chartered group responsible for reviewing and approving or rejecting change requests to project baselines.

Technique that tracks row-level changes in a source database and propagates those changes to downstream systems.

A Delta Lake feature that records row-level changes (insert, update, delete) to a table so downstream consumers can process incremental changes.

Cloud CDN caches HTTP(S) load-balanced content at Google's edge nodes to reduce latency for end users.

A distributed network of servers that caches and delivers static content to users from geographically closer edge nodes.

A Cisco-proprietary Layer 2 protocol that advertises device type, IP address, and interface information to directly connected Cisco devices.

EC-Council certification validating knowledge of hacking techniques, tools, and countermeasures used to assess and secure systems legally.

A Linux kernel mechanism that limits, accounts for, and isolates CPU, memory, and I/O resource usage per process group.

Documentation that tracks the collection, transfer, and handling of digital evidence to ensure its integrity for legal proceedings.

A formal process for reviewing, approving, or rejecting proposed modifications to project scope, schedule, cost, or other baselines.

A formal process for reviewing, approving, and managing changes to project documents, deliverables, or baselines.

A formal process for requesting, reviewing, approving, implementing, and documenting changes to IT systems to minimize risk.

A deployment container used to move metadata components from one Salesforce org to another connected org.

A command-line utility used to change the SELinux security context of a file or directory, effective until a relabel is performed.

In Structured Streaming, a directory storing the offset and state progress of a streaming query so it can resume after failure without reprocessing data.

Any component managed in the CMDB, such as hardware, software, or services, tracked to support IT processes.

A practice where team members frequently merge code changes into a shared repository, triggering automated builds and tests to detect integration errors quickly.

A set of practices and toolchain stages that automate building, testing, and deploying software changes frequently and reliably.

Core information security model comprising Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability as the three fundamental security objectives.

The three core principles of information security: keeping data secret, accurate, and accessible to authorized users.

The foundational security model comprising Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability as core properties to protect information.

A foundational security model representing Confidentiality, Integrity, and Availability as the three core objectives of information security.

An IP address allocation method that uses a prefix length to define network and host portions, used to specify VPC and subnet address ranges.

An IP addressing method that replaces classful addressing by expressing network prefixes with variable-length subnet masks in slash notation.

A method for allocating IP addresses and routing using variable-length subnet masking, represented as an IP address and prefix length.

An IP addressing scheme that replaces classful addressing by using variable-length subnet masks to allocate IP addresses more efficiently.

ISACA credential validating expertise in information security management, governance, risk management, and incident response.

A supervised ML task that assigns input data to one of a set of discrete categories or labels.

The text-based interface used to configure, monitor, and manage Junos devices through operational and configuration modes.

A JavaScript script in ServiceNow that executes in the user's browser to control form behavior, validate fields, or manipulate UI elements.

A GCP DDoS protection and web application firewall service that applies security policies to HTTP(S) load balancers.

A GCP network security service providing DDoS protection and WAF rules for external load balancers.

A GCP service that caches content at Google's globally distributed edge points of presence to reduce latency.

Fully managed workflow orchestration service on GCP built on Apache Airflow for authoring, scheduling, and monitoring pipelines.

A GCP service that controls HTTPS access to applications by verifying user identity before allowing a connection.

A GCP service providing high-bandwidth, low-latency private connectivity between on-premises networks and GCP.

A GCP service providing dedicated or partner physical connections between an on-premises network and GCP VPC.

Managed service on GCP for creating, importing, and managing cryptographic keys used to encrypt data.