Kickstart Your Cybersecurity Career With CompTIA Security+

Passing the CompTIA Security+ certification exam is an important milestone in the careers of many cybersecurity professionals. But just what does this certification mean? And how do you learn the skills necessary to earn it? Let’s dive in.

What Is CompTIA Security+?

CompTIA Security+ is an entry-level, vendor-neutral cybersecurity certification. It validates the baseline skills needed to perform core security functions such as incident response, risk mitigation, and threat detection.

The certification covers a variety of topics, including network security, threats and vulnerabilities, access control, and cryptography, preparing individuals for various roles, like security administrator or analyst. IT professionals often regard CompTIA Security+ as a starting point for a career in cybersecurity.

What Topics Does a CompTIA Security+ Certification Cover?

A comprehensive syllabus covers topics such as:

General Security Concepts

It’s essential to have a foundational understanding of the underpinning security concepts of CompTIA security. This starts with security controls and understanding technical, preventive, managerial, deterrent, operational, detective, physical, corrective, compensating, and directive controls.

A CompTIA Security+ certification course will also teach you about confidentiality, integrity, availability, zero trust, and deception/disruption technology. Change management is also a core tenet of CompTIA security, so a course should explain business processes, technical implications, documentation, and version control.

Last, you’ll learn about cryptographic solutions, like using public key infrastructure, encryption, obfuscation, hashing, digital signatures, and blockchain.

Threats and Vulnerabilities — and How To Mitigate Them

A CompTIA Security+ course won’t make you read Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, but at least one principle of that book is relevant: Know your enemy.

Understanding the threats cyberattacks pose and what vulnerabilities they might exploit — and how to mitigate them — is a core part of modern cybersecurity. That’s why these programs cover:

• Malicious activity: Including malware, password, application, physical, network, and cryptographic attacks.
• Mitigation techniques: Such as how to use segmentation, access control, configuration enforcement, and patching to protect systems.
• Threat actors: Looking at the different kinds of potential actors, like nation-states, unskilled attackers, hacktivists, insider threats, and organized crime.
• Threat vectors: Including unsecure networks, social engineering methods, file-based attacks, voice call manipulations, and vulnerable software vectors.
• Vulnerabilities: Covering various potential weak spots, such as applications, hardware, mobile devices, virtualization, cloud-specific, and supply chain vulnerabilities.

Security Architecture

It’s crucial to know about architectural models, enterprise infrastructure, data protection, and resilience and recovery. Different models require different security architectures. For example, security best practices vary from on-premises systems to cloud-based ones.

Different data types also require specialized consideration. Resilience and recovery concepts require study, too. These include site considerations, platform diversity, and continuity of operations.

Security Operations

Comprehensive cybersecurity training touches on numerous security operations, including:

• Alerting and monitoring.
• Asset management.
• Automation.
• Computing resources.
• Data sources.
• Identity and access management.
• Incident response.
• Vulnerability management.

Management and Oversight

Security governance and compliance are both key to CompTIA security. Understanding how to follow and enforce guidelines, policies, and standards is critical, as is understanding different compliance regulations, such as:

• CCPA.
• GDPR.
• FISMA.
• HIPAA.
• PCI-DSS.
• NIST.
• SOC.

What Skills Will You Learn in a CompTIA Security+ Training Course?

By successfully completing a training course from a reputable and professional organization, you will learn many in-demand skills, such as:

• Threat identification, analysis, and mitigation.
• Security controls and risk management strategies.
• Securing hybrid and cloud environments.
• Access control, authentication, and identity management.
• Network defense, encryption, and incident response.
• Compliance, governance, and regulatory standards.
• IT fundamentals from A+ and Network+ to reinforce cybersecurity expertise.

What Career Paths Start With CompTIA Security+ Certification?

By earning a Security+ certification, you set yourself up for a successful IT or cybersecurity career. Certification can even help people in tangentially related fields, like ‌data center technicians.

Earning Security+ certification opens a clearer pathway for the following professionals:

Security Analysts

Security+ provides the foundational knowledge needed to identify and analyze threats, attacks, and vulnerabilities in an enterprise environment. It directly equips analysts with the skills for implementing security solutions, performing risk management, and participating in incident response.

IT Security Specialists

Certification validates a broad understanding of security implementation, including network security, access control, and application security. By passing the Security+ exam, you demonstrate to employers that you can apply best practices for securing hybrid environments and maintaining compliance with security policies and regulations.

Systems Administrators

For systems administrators, Security+ is crucial for securing the systems they manage. Learning about applying secure baselines, hardening operating systems, and managing identity and access controls is foundational to success as a systems administrator. CompTIA security training elevates an administrator's ability to ensure system reliability, performance, and security while implementing enterprise-level controls.

Network Administrators

Security+ augments a network administrator's expertise by focusing on securing network architecture, including the implementation of firewalls, secure protocols, and network segmentation. This knowledge ensures an administrator can effectively design and troubleshoot security measures to protect their organization's network and data integrity.

FAQs About CompTIA Security+

Here are some frequently asked questions about Security+ certification and training:

How Much Money Can I Make With CompTIA Security+ Certification?

By earning your CompTIA security certification, you’ll have a good chance of earning a position with a starting salary of $90,000–$139,000, with growth potential of earning over $200,000 in due course.

How Long Does It Take To Learn Security+?

There isn’t just one CompTIA Security+ training course out there, so the length of time depends on the specific course in which you enroll. At ACI Learning, our CompTIA security training programs require 4.5 hours to over 34 hours, depending on the course.

Is the CompTIA Security+ Exam Hard?

Many consider the CompTIA security certification exam challenging due to its broad scope of topics, the need to apply security concepts in performance-based questions, and time constraints. The security exam certainly isn't impossible — an established security engineer probably wouldn't be overly challenged — but it can be difficult for those new to IT or cybersecurity.

For example, if you don't have prior experience, like the Network+ certification or two years of IT experience, you'll need consistent, structured study over months in a CompTIA security certification training program, or a shorter but more intense security boot camp course.

What Is the Best Way To Study for Security+?

The best way to prepare for CompTIA certification is through a program with hands-on labs and practice tests built in. For example, the CompTIA Security+ Certification Bundle combines Security+ (SY0-701), Network+ (N10-009), and A+ Core 1 & 2 training, giving you the strongest foundation in IT, covering all the pertinent fundamental security concepts.

After completing this comprehensive cybersecurity training, you'll graduate from theory to practical, job-ready skills fast, whether you're aiming for a role as a security analyst, systems administrator, or IT security specialist.

What Are the Emerging Trends in Security+?

New trends for CompTIA Security+ focus heavily on AI and machine learning integration for faster threat detection. Beyond this, other emerging ideas include the critical need for zero-trust architecture beyond traditional perimeters, cloud security, and advanced identity management, such as multifactor authentication.

Also prominent are securing IoT devices, supply chain security, preparing for quantum computing threats, and combating sophisticated social engineering through advanced phishing. This requires a proactive, platform-based security approach.

Level Up Your Cybersecurity Career Path

Start your cybersecurity journey with CompTIA Security+, or explore our other online IT and cybersecurity courses.