The official courseware for CCSK assumes that you, the learner, have some background in IT. As CSA states:

"We recommend attendees have at least a basic understanding of security fundamentals, such as firewalls, secure development, encryption, and identity management".

You may or may not have this basic understanding. And I find there are sometimes other gaps in the knowledge of learners too.

The units in this section (and in later sections) will provide you with some preparatory material. If you are not familiar with what is described in them, you will have a hard time understanding some of the body of knowledge.

There is also additional material in each of the following sections, woven into the flow, for example on SDN.

On top of that, here are some WikipediA articles that could be helpful (small tip: most of them also have translations in other languages).

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encryption
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firewall_(computing) (read this after the units on DNS and networking)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Identity_management (this is less well organised and not completely aligned with the CCSK body of knowledge)
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_development_security (this mainly gives a lot of pointers and concepts, but not a lot of explanation and answers)

For a more extensive introduction to IT for non-techies I highly recommend Brian Kernighan's book: "Understanding the Digital World: What You Need to Know about Computers, the Internet, Privacy, and Security, Second Edition", even though it is very light on cloud computing.

If you find any other relevant articles that have helped you understand some of the CCSK prerequisites, feel free to use a comment in the discussion area to share it with your fellow students. Equally, add a reply to those comments for further clarification or improvement.

And you can also use comments to ask questions. I will also use that to improve the learning materials.