Global ICT trade association CompTIA has unveiled a claimed groundbreaking, vendor-neutral certification, Cybersecurity Analyst (CSA+), that it says is the first of its kind to bring behavioural analytics to the forefront of assessing cyber threats.
CompTIA president and CEO Todd Thibodeaux says the Internet of Things is not only bringing “greatly expanded capability to homes and businesses”, it’s also opening up potentially “billons of new points of vulnerability that need to be secured”.
“It’s an economic and societal imperative to train and certify hundreds of thousands of IT professionals with the analytical skills they need to address the complexity and diversity of threats as they multiply.”
According to CompTIA’s senior director for products Dr James Stanger by placing greater emphasis on data analytics, “we get a real-time, holistic view of the behaviour of the network, its users and their devices to identify potential vulnerabilities and strengthen them before an intrusion happens”.
{loadposition peter}“Armed with this information, cybersecurity professionals can more precisely identify potential risks and vulnerabilities so that resources can be allocated where they’re most needed.”
CompTIA says the demand for cybersecurity analysts is strong and it cites the US Bureau of Labor Statistics projected growth of 18% from 2014 to 2024, making it the fastest growing job roles in the US.workforce -- not just in technology but across all categories.
“Data analytics is key,” says Jim Lucari, senior manager of certification at HP Enterprise.
“Everybody in technology should have this CSA+. It should be mandatory if you’re going to stay in IT over the coming decade.”
Thibodeaux says the new CSA+ certification strengthens CompTIA’s portfolio of security credentials and bridges the skills gap between CompTIA Security+ and the CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP) exam to create a vendor-neutral cybersecurity career pathway.
And, he says the CSA+ certification will offer broad-spectrum validation of knowledge and skills required to configure and use cyber-threat detection tools, perform data analysis and interpret the results to identify vulnerabilities, threats and risks to an organisation – and certifies knowledge of a data-driven approach to information security.