Security Service Edge Engineer Advanced Practice Exam: Hard Questions 2025

A global organization is designing an SSE rollout for 25,000 remote users. Requirements: (1) all web and SaaS traffic must be inspected with inline security, (2) private application access must be granted without network-level VPN, (3) least-privilege per app, (4) minimize latency by steering users to the closest enforcement point. Which architecture best meets these requirements?

An engineer must integrate Prisma Access (SSE) with an on-prem data center where private apps live in multiple VLANs across different routing domains. The data center team insists on preserving their existing routing and segmentation while enabling high availability for service connections. Which design is the MOST robust and operationally safe?

A company wants to enforce DLP for SaaS uploads and also apply threat prevention for all web browsing. They discover that many endpoints (including BYOD) cannot install agents. They still require user-based policy. Which deployment approach is MOST appropriate?

After onboarding Prisma Access for remote users, the security team reports that traffic to sanctioned Microsoft 365 is intermittently bypassing inspection and going direct. The current configuration uses a split-tunnel list for 'trusted SaaS' and a separate SWG policy for web filtering. What is the most likely root cause and best corrective action?

A rollout requires explicit proxy for unmanaged devices. Users authenticate via SAML to the proxy. In pilot, users are repeatedly prompted to authenticate on every new browser session and some applications fail because they do not handle interactive auth. Which change best improves user experience while maintaining strong identity?

You need to implement least-privilege access to a private application through ZTNA/App Access. The application is hosted on multiple servers behind a load balancer, and only a specific group should reach it. Security also mandates that no lateral movement to other private subnets be possible if an endpoint is compromised. Which configuration best achieves this?

Operations notices a spike in 'unknown user' events in SWG logs after migrating identity to a new IdP. Users can browse, but policies meant for specific groups are not applied. What is the MOST effective first validation step to isolate whether the issue is identity assertion vs directory/group mapping?

A security team created a strict DLP profile for outbound uploads. After enabling it, they see an unexpected increase in blocked traffic for a specific SaaS app used by Finance, but only when users upload large spreadsheets. Investigation shows the app uses chunked upload with multiple parallel connections. What is the best operational approach to reduce false positives while maintaining protection?

Remote users report that some internal apps accessed via App Access work, but one critical app fails only for users in a specific region. The app is reachable from the data center, and service connection health shows 'up'. A packet capture on the server shows SYNs arriving from Prisma Access but no subsequent ACKs from users. What is the most likely issue and the correct fix?

After enabling SSL decryption for outbound web traffic, users complain that a subset of SaaS applications randomly fail with certificate errors, while most sites work. Logs show the failures correlate with domains using certificate pinning and some endpoints using a corporate-managed trust store while others use a user-only store. What is the best remediation strategy that balances security and reliability?