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The Microsoft certification series
Microsoft's fundamentals certifications: SC-900 for security, compliance and identity, AI-901 for Azure AI. The current skills outlines, in plain English.
Choose your path
Microsoft's fundamentals exams are the certified entry into its cloud. SC-900 covers security, compliance and identity across Microsoft Entra and Azure; AI-901 replaces AI-900 as the Azure AI fundamentals exam.
Fundamentals • security
Security, compliance and identity across the Microsoft cloud: Entra, the security stack and the compliance portal, mapped to the November 2025 outline.
Official weights · current outline
Fundamentals • AI
Azure AI fundamentals under the new exam code, including the Python primer AI-901 now expects and a full AI-900 migration appendix.
Official weights · current outline
What is included
The books differ in length and in how practice is arranged, because the exams differ. Everything else is the same in all 2.
Chapters follow the certifying body's own outline, and each area gets its own section with a scoping paragraph, the explanation and Key Takeaways.
SC-900 4 · AI-901 2Callouts sit beside the concept they belong to, flagging the distinctions the exam tests and the answers that look right under time pressure.
Throughout every chapterQuestions are printed with the answer key in the same volume, written in the exam's own style and tagged to the domain they came from.
297 questions across 2 titlesDelivery, scoring and the published domain weights, then a domain-weighted study plan for where the remaining hours should go.
Front matter, every titleLook inside
This is page 184 of the SC-900 guide. Every section in every Microsoft title is built from the same parts. Select a marker to see what each one does.
Marker 1 · The section heading
The heading on this page is Where Defender TI Fits in the Microsoft Defender Ecosystem. Sections follow the certifying body's own outline, so the table of contents doubles as the exam blueprint, and each one is self-contained enough to study alone.
Marker 2 · The explanation
Concepts lead with the term, then say what it is and what it is for. This page continues:
Product Convergence Note…Verbatim from page 184
Marker 3 · Exam Tip
Exam Tips sit beside the concept they belong to, naming the distinction the exam tests.
Exam Tip. : The exam distinguishes Defender TI from other Defender products by its purpose. Defender TI does not detect or block threats on its own; it provides context for threats that other products have already surfaced. If a question describes an analyst researching an unfamiliar domain, IP address, or threat actor profile, Defender TI is the answer. If a question describes blocking malware on an endpoint, that is Defender for Endpoint territory.Verbatim from page 184
Marker 4 · Common Pitfall
Common Pitfalls name the plausible answer that costs you the mark, placed where you first meet the idea.
Common Pitfall. : Candidates often assume the full Defender TI dataset is free because the portal is accessible without a separate license step. The free tier covers basic reputation lookup only. The finished threat-actor articles, complete passive DNS history, full WHOIS records, and SSL certificate chains all require the premium subscription.Verbatim from page 184
Marker 5 · Key Takeaways
Every section closes with Key Takeaways, the shortest version of what you have just read, built for the final-week pass.
• Microsoft Defender Threat Intelligence aggregates IOC data, threat actor profiles, and internet infrastructure relationships from Microsoft's global sensor network, accessible at.Verbatim from page 184
Straight out of the book
Printed here exactly as they appear in the practice sets. Nothing has been simplified for the website.
A function app needs to read a database connection string stored as a secret in Azure Key Vault. The development team wants to eliminate the need to store any credentials in the application configuration. Which authentication mechanism is MOST appropriate?
Correct answer: C
A system-assigned managed identity is an identity in Microsoft Entra ID created for and automatically managed by the Azure resource. The identity has no password or client secret that a developer must store. Granting it the "Key Vault Secrets User" role via Azure RBAC allows the function app to retrieve secrets at runtime using its automatically managed token, breaking the credential storage problem entirely.
The SC-900 guide explains every answer.
A call center records all customer calls. The compliance team needs to automatically extract the customer name, order number, and resolution type from each recording and store them in a database. Which information extraction pipeline is MOST appropriate?
Correct answer: B
The chapter describes the audio information extraction pipeline explicitly: "Speech-to-text transcribes the audio → the transcript is processed through NER, keyword extraction, or a generative AI model to extract structured fields." Audio cannot be directly processed by OCR or image techniques. STT produces a text transcript; NER then identifies customer name, order number; field extraction maps those to the database schema. Azure Content Understanding handles this pipeline.
The AI-901 guide explains every answer.
Side by side
Exam facts come from each book's own exam overview. Book facts come from the printed interior. A dash means the book does not state it.
| Comparison | SC-900 | AI-901 |
|---|---|---|
| Focus | Fundamentals | Fundamentals |
| Experience | None | None; basic Python reading helps |
| Domains | 4 | 2 |
| Pass mark | 700 / 000 | 700 |
| Practice in the book | 140 by domain | 157 by domain |
| Pages | 387 | 293 |
| Price | $20.99 | $20.99 |
Why Simply Certified
Simply Certified is a study guide series for working professionals who need to certify efficiently, without a two-thousand-page reference. Chapters and practice questions are both mapped to the certifying body's published exam objectives, so your practice results point directly to the domains that need more work.
Questions