ISC CISSP Certification

Investing money and efforts to earn the (ISC)2 CISSP or Certified Information Systems Security Professional certification will reap the best return on investment as this is the gold standard qualification that any cybersecurity professional can earn. This individual designation will leverage your career and give you the confidence to lay hand on pivotal job roles. The broad-spectrum knowledge, earned via the CISSP certification, demonstrates candidates’ perfection and an in-depth understanding of technical aspects of designing, engineering, and management of an organization’s security infrastructure. Also, this is one of those rare cybersecurity certificates that meet the strict ANSI/ISO/IEC Standard 17024. Additionally, it adheres to the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) Directive 8570.1 requirements.

Who Can Aim at It?

You can aim for this CISSP certification if you’re an in-service security specialist, manager, or practitioner bearing the responsibility of the right implementation of security principles and concepts in a given ecosystem. Job roles like a Chief Information Security Officer, IT Manager, Security Analyst, or Director of Security are usually perfect for it. Such professionals when certified can excel at the job front and perform mundane tasks with added perfection and effortlessness.

Prior Expertise

Hold on for a second and understand that the CISSP is not for everyone. In particular, it is for those who have already gained considerable exposure to the cybersecurity world and have worked for a minimum of 5 years in 2 or more domains explained in the CISSP CBK handbook. Anyone having a four-year college or advanced degree, included in the (ISC)2 list of recognized institutes, can aim at the CISSP designation after four years of work experience. Well, you have no related experience but still interested to earn the certificate? Then become an Associate of (ISC)2, pass the final exam, and get certified, where you will then have 6 years to get the 5-year experience needed.

Certification Earning Process

The very first step of the certificate earning process is to find out whether or not you comply with the basic requirements. Once this front is clear, move ahead and gather the related exam details. The English language-based CISSP exam is based on CAT or Computerized Adaptive Testing. Thus, to earn the CISSP certification, one should pass the CISSP CAT exam that is 3 hours long and includes 100-150 questions. These items are based on MCQ and advanced innovative format. Plus, earning 700 out of 1000 marks is essential to taste success in the final exam. The test format in other languages differs a bit from the English language exam. So, if you’re taking the CISSP Linear exam in the French, German, Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese, or Korean languages, then the exam will last for 6 hours and include 250 questions, where the format and other details are the same as for the CAT option. Overall, the CISSP evaluation is available globally and can be earned via any of (ISC)2 Authorized PPC and PVTC Select Pearson VUE testing centers. Finally, the test costs $699 for a single attempt and it will be paid as an exam voucher.

Skills Covered in CISSP Certification Exam

After gathering the basic exam details, the next move of any CISSP aspirant should be knowing what skills are covered in it. So, here is a quick overview of them:

1 - Security and Risk Management

This skill area demonstrates the advanced level of expertise in confidentiality, integrity, and availability concepts. Risk management & threat management terms, the enforcement of personnel security policies, spreading awareness about security practices, and periodic content review are some of the topics covered extensively in this domain.

2 - Asset Security

Next on the list is asset security that throws light on concepts like asset and data classification, protecting privacy during data collection alongside the storage process, and proper determination of data security controls. In particular, here, you’ll get equipped with such notions as data owners, remanence, tailoring, scoping, and the selection of varied standards.

3 - Security Architecture and Engineering

This objective is known to create seasoned security professionals as it explains what all is needed to implement the engineering process, find out the security capabilities, detail the security model fundamentals, and spot & sort out vulnerabilities existing in a mobile system, security architectures, and embedded devices. Cryptography, facility design, and site controls for security are also covered extensively by such a part.

4 - Communication and Network Security

The focus of the fourth skill is on the implementation of secure design principles in a given network architecture along with securing network components. In addition, technologies like Open System Interconnection and TCP/IP are covered professionally by this area. What is more, learners will be able to gain mastery over multilayer protocol implementation, end-point security, and content-distribution networks before the learning of this domain ends.

5 - Identify and Access Management

This skill area manifests verified and time-critical cognizance related to logical access to assets, the integration of identity as a third-party service, authorization mechanisms like RBAC & MAC, and provisioning lifecycle-like concepts such as reviews for user access, deprovisioning, and account access for systems.

6 - Security Assessment and Testing

By paying attention to this learning domain, one can emerge as a dependable security professional capable of designing and validating assessment, test, and audit strategies. More so, security control, test output, generating report analysis, facilitating security audits, vulnerability assessment, interface testing, and security audit concepts are explained in detail here.

7 - Security Operations

This skill has covered a large portion of exam content and explains key investigating types, media management, logging and monitoring activities, the application of resource protection as well as investigation techniques, and evidence collection. Even so, the learning periphery extends further as notions like asset & configuration management, Service Level Agreements (SLA), incident management, recovery strategies implementation, addressing personnel safety, and security concerns are also well covered by this topic.

8 - Software Development Security

You’ll be able to learn about Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) and ways to integrate security principles in the last objective. Effortlessly, it imparts every bit of learning related to assessing the effectiveness of software security, applying verified coding guidelines, risk analysis, the implementation of secure coding practices, and the security of code repositories.

Bright Career Ahead

A mere mention of the CISSP certification on the CV of any security specialist will increase his/her worth twofold. Instantly, an intermediate-level specialist will be considered an expert and will be placed in key security job roles. Being a globally recognized designation, the CISSP lets the successful candidate explore the opportunities spun across the world. Speaking of the pay aspect of the CISSP certification, it is the best in the industry. As per ZipRecruiter, a CISSP certified security professional can make anywhere $125,470 per year in the United States.

Certification Path

If you’d like to move forward within the cybersecurity domain, then it’s a wise decision to pursue the concentrations of the (ISC)2 CISSP validation. Thus, among them, you’ll come across the CISSP-ISSAP with a focus on security architecture, the CISSP-ISSEP certificate scrutinizing the processes of security engineering, and finally, the (ISC)2 CISSP-ISSMP designation that will qualify you for a position of a security management professional.