CompTIA Security+ is the best certification to earn to start your cybersecurity career. It equips you with the foundation skills required to carry out major security functions and build an IT career in the security field. Candidates, wishing to work as security engineer/analyst, network/cloud engineer, systems administrator, helpdesk analyst, security administrator, IT project manager, IT auditor should consider gaining this CompTIA designation.
Why opt for Security+ certification?
First of all, it is vendor-neutral, which means that you can complete tasks on various platforms and working with various technologies. Secondly, it’s quite popular in the IT market, as it fulfills the DoD 8570 compliance. It means that this certification is chosen by defense organizations worldwide. Thirdly, it equips candidates with practical skills and makes them ready to solve complex security issues. Fourthly, the basic cybersecurity skills can be used in other job roles to protect software, hardware, and systems. Fifthly, the Security+ certification covers the latest trends and techniques available in cybersecurity world. Thus, it proves that the certified professional possesses the crucial tech skills in risk management, cloud/hybrid operations, security controls, incident response, forensics, to complete the given tasks effectively and within a short period of time.
The skills assessed by the Security+ certification include:
- Ability to mitigate attacks, threats, and vulnerabilities received from newer custom devices. Thus exam-takers will deal with embedded devices and IoT, newer DDoS, and social engineering attacks.
- Ability to provide secure enterprise environments based on the cloud, since more and more organizations shift to hybrid networks.
- Skills to work with access management, basic cryptography, PKI, wireless, end-to-end security, and administering identity will be checked.
- Skills to deal with operations and incident response will also be tested.
- Skills to support organizational risk management and compliance to regulations (FISMA, HIPAA, NIST) will be verified.
The exam one has to pass to gain the Security+ designation is coded SY0-601. It comprises 90 multiple choice and performance-based questions to be completed within 90-minute time frame. The minimum score that testifies your success is 750 on a scale of 100-900. And before sitting for this evaluation, you should obtain the Network+ certification and have at least 2 years of experience in IT administration with the focus on security. And to add more, you have to pay $370 to enroll for the test.
The exam verifies that you are capable of evaluating the security state of an enterprise environment, possess skills to apply appropriate security solutions, protect hybrid environments, can respond to security incidents, and are knowledgeable of applicable laws and policies.
Considering the fact that with the Security+ certification you can apply for a wide range of job positions, the salary you can earn per year also ranges from $59,009, which is the average, to $98,000 which is the highest, but still is not the top. And, regarding the companies you can apply your skills in include NETFLIX, splunk>, Johns Hopkins University, to mention some.