While preparing for the AZ-800: Administering Windows Server Hybrid Core Infrastructure exam, I kept seeing the same question come up: does thinking only about on-prem make this exam harder than it needs to be? For admins with solid Windows Server experience, this is a very real concern and one worth addressing early.
What I realized pretty quickly is that AZ-800 isn’t testing classic Windows Server skills in isolation. It’s testing how well you understand Windows Server in a hybrid environment and how your decisions change once Azure is involved. The exam shifts the focus from pure configuration to understanding workflows, dependencies, and trade-offs.
Instead of asking where a setting lives, many questions ask what you should do next in a hybrid scenario. You’re expected to step back and think about identity, management, networking, storage, and compute together, not as separate topics. If you approach every question with an on-prem-only mindset, it’s easy to jump to familiar answers and miss what the exam is really testing.
This becomes obvious in scenario-based and troubleshooting questions. You’re often given a hybrid setup where something isn’t working, and the question isn’t about a command or feature. It’s about choosing the most practical solution with the least impact.
A common mistake is assuming that strong knowledge of AD DS, DNS, Group Policy, or file services is enough. Those fundamentals matter, but AZ-800 rarely tests them alone. It also tests when to use hybrid options like Azure File Sync, Azure VMs, or cloud-based management instead of traditional on-prem solutions. Therefore, when I was preparing for this exam, to avoid this mistake I used a mix of practice exams and video tutorials to bridge the gap between on-prem knowledge and hybrid thinking. Certboosters exam questions (according to my experience, you may go with what helps you) helped me the most because the questions felt closer to the exam’s scenario-driven style.
The takeaway is simple. AZ-800 isn’t harder because it’s more technical. It’s harder if you stay stuck in on-prem-only thinking. Once you start approaching it as a hybrid exam, things make a lot more sense.
So if you’re preparing now, are you studying tasks in isolation, or are you actively asking yourself when and why Azure becomes the better choice in each scenario?