Bring strategy, operations, identity, infrastructure, applications, data, and AI into one defensible architecture and use a repeatable method for SC-100 scenario questions.
Use a six-step architecture method
- Identify business outcome and critical assets.
- Extract constraints, trust boundaries, and threat paths.
- Assign identity, data, network, application, and operational control objectives.
- Select the smallest set of capabilities that satisfies the objectives.
- Define owners, dependencies, evidence, exceptions, and recovery.
- Validate the design with tests and measurable outcomes.
Read scenario questions as decisions
SC-100 tests architecture judgment. Highlight words such as minimize privilege, hybrid, multicloud, private, automatic, audit, recovery, agent, or business continuity. Eliminate answers that solve a neighboring problem, add unnecessary operational burden, or ignore a stated constraint.
Integrate control planes
Identity governs users, workloads, and agents. Network design limits paths. Application and data controls protect business operations. SIEM, XDR, audit, and posture systems provide evidence and response. BCDR provides a recovery path when prevention fails. The architecture is strongest when these controls share ownership and signals without sharing excessive privilege.
Capstone decision record
For a proposed customer-service AI agent, document: data classification; user and agent identities; retrieval scope; tool permissions; approval for account changes; API protection; prompt and output controls; logging; incident ownership; privacy retention; and rollback. Then trace how a compromised user, agent, dependency, or administrator could still reach critical data.
Final check
Prefer answers that are least-privileged, policy-driven, measurable, resilient, and operationally owned. Avoid absolute claims and single-product solutions to multi-boundary risks.