When you start studying for the exam, you should know what topics to study so that you maximize your success rate. First of all, you should get a good grasp on the five different Cisco security policies. You should know how to use each policy, what their purpose is, and what the effect of each policy is. In order to study for the test, you should take at least 500-ixture study questions. The main Cisco security topics that you should focus on are: CCNA, CCIE, CCNP, CMMI, and BSI.
To study for the Cisco ITE 500-254 exam, you need to know at least five different policies, all of which pertain to different aspects of security. You should understand the difference between authentication and authorization, and what each does for your network. You should also learn about the difference between Static and Shared IP, and why each one matters for your enterprise. With these basic concepts, you should be able to learn what types of policies exist that will apply to your environment. For instance, there are policy service domains, interface posture, certificate service domains, virtual private networks (VPLS), gateway service domains, and so forth.
Examining your Cisco training materials, such as Cisco CCNA Exam Definition, CCNA Tools, Cisco CCNA Remediation Manual, or CCDA Video Tutorials, can help you learn what type of authentication you need to use for your environment. Two common methods exist for authentication, known as opaque and elliptic. Obtaining a good understanding of each method, and how it will affect your infrastructure, is important before passing your Cisco ITE Exam. You should choose three of these authentication methods, and work through the rest of the topics from there.
The first type of authentication is called opaque. This method of authentication requires two separate certifications, one from your Cisco Institute training and one from a third-party source. With this method, you create a separate certificate for each service that you want to sign. This is a good way to protect yourself against pass-failure, but you must have a good Cisco ITE instructor explain it to you, since it is a little more complex than the simple “enter” and “print” command that you might have heard about in networking classes.
The second type of authentication is called inline posture. With inline posture, you create a centralized place where you create user identities, associate keywords with them, and then assign them to servers. This way, each user has a unique user identity group, called a key, that uniquely identifies them on the network. When a user logs on, they get their key and password from their key, rather than having to memorize a bunch of disparate user information.
One way to manage user identity groups is to have internal endpoints in your infrastructure, such as within the same switch or router. With internal endpoints, you can create different user identity groups with different port definitions. You can also have policies associated with each identity group, which would be enforced if you had a firewall between these internal endpoints. To simplify things a bit more, choose three or four different firewall policies that you can apply to the different traffic going in and out of each IP packet.
Another option for managing your ID token is to have an internal monitoring and reporting device installed on each workstation in your network. In this configuration, the Cisco ISE exams must be completed on each workstation with an active monitoring and reporting device. The idea here is that the exam must be performed on each workstation, in the same configuration, so that the default settings for each workstation are the same as the other end-users. This option is a bit complicated because of the additional hardware necessary for the functionality, as well as special policy rules for different users. For most people, though, an internal reporting device will be just fine just choose three or four different monitoring nodes and select the right one based on the traffic pattern on that machine.
