Cyber Security Architect

Career Area: Information Technology

Occupation Group: Network and Systems Engineering

Salary

Percentile wages tell how much a certain percentage of an overall population in a geographic area or within a given industry or field makes. The percentile wage estimate is the value of a wage below which a certain percent of workers fall.

An example would be the 25th percentile, 25 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 75 percent earn more than the estimated wage value. At the 75th percentile, 75 percent of workers employed in that occupation earn less and 25 percent earn more than the estimated wage value.

A typical Cyber Security Architect earns the following wages (national and state):

State

The average salary in North Carolina for those pursuing this career is $122,866

National

The average salary in the United States for those pursuing this career is $122,718

What Does a Professional in this Career Do?

Builds and develops systems that protect the security of large databases, including databases with customer information and patient files. Includes understanding of client computer systems, potential weak points in security, and monitoring and response to security issues.

Employment Trends

The job demand and job growth statistics shown here were derived from job posts over the past year. Expected job growth projections are extrapolated from year-over-year job post listing history.

Job demand and job growth is expected at the following rates:

Skills

A professional in this position typically utilizes the following skills in the course of everyday work in this exciting and challenging field:

Baseline Skills

The following are baseline skills every Cyber Security Architect is expected to have in order to experience success in this field:

• Communication Skills: The ability to convey information to another effectively and efficiently.
• Teamwork / Collaboration: Experience working in collaborative efforts with a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective and efficient way.
• Planning: Working experience with the process of thinking about and organizing the activities required to achieve desired goals.
• Research: Experience performing creative and systematic work to understand a product, market, or customer, either before building a new solution, or to troubleshoot an existing issue
• Problem Solving: Problem solving consists of using generic or ad hoc methods, in an orderly manner, for finding solutions to problems.

Specialized Skills

These skills are specific to working in this career:

• Information Security: Information security, sometimes shortened to InfoSec, is the practice of preventing unauthorized access, use, disclosure, disruption, modification, inspection, recording or destruction of information.
• Network Security: Network security consists of the policies and practices adopted to prevent and monitor unauthorized access, misuse, modification, or denial of a computer network and network-accessible resources.
• Cryptography: Experience of the practice of developing techniques for secure communication in the presence of third parties.
• Information Systems: An information system (IS) is an organized system for the collection, organization, storage and communication of information.
• Authentication: Authentication is the act of confirming the truth of an attribute of a single piece of data claimed true by an entity.

Distinguishing Skills

Any Cyber Security Architect that possesses the following skills will stand out against the competition:

• Cloud Computing: Working experience of Cloud Computing, which is an information technology (IT) paradigm that enables ubiquitous access to shared pools of configurable system resources and higher-level services that can be rapidly provisioned with minimal management effort, often over the Internet.
• PCI DSS: Working experience of PCI DSS, which is a security standard that has requirements for security management, policies, procedures, network architecture, software design and more.
• Public Key Infrastructure (PKI): Working experience of Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), which is a set of roles, policies, and procedures needed to create, manage, distribute, use, store, and revoke digital certificates and manage public-key encryption. The purpose of a PKI is to facilitate the secure electronic transfer of information for a range of network activities such as e-commerce, internet banking and confidential email. It is required for activities where simple passwords are an inadequate authentication method and more rigorous proof is required to confirm the identity of the parties involved in the communication and to validate the information being transferred.
• Data Loss Prevention: Working experience of Data Loss Prevention. Data loss prevention software detects potential data breaches/data ex-filtration transmissions and prevents them by monitoring, detecting and blocking sensitive data while in-use (endpoint actions), in-motion (network traffic), and at-rest (data storage). The terms data loss and data leak are related and are often used interchangeably. Data loss incidents turn into data leak incidents in cases where media containing sensitive information is lost and subsequently acquired by an unauthorized party. However, a data leak is possible without losing the data on the originating side. Other terms associated with data leakage prevention are information leak detection and prevention (ILDP), information leak prevention (ILP), content monitoring and filtering (CMF), information protection and control (IPC) and extrusion prevention system (EPS), as opposed to intrusion prevention system.
• Splunk: Splunk is a horizontal technology used for application management, security and compliance, as well as business and Web analytics.

Experience

This position typically requires the following level of experience. The numbers presented in the pie charts below were derived from actual job posts over the past year. Not all job postings list experience requirements.

Common Job Titles

It is possible to find work in this field in positions commonly listed as the following job titles:

• Security Architect
• Information Security Architect
• Cyber Security Architect
• It Security Architect
• Senior Security Architect

Similar Occupations

If you are interested in exploring similar occupations, you may want to research the following job titles:

• Cyber Security Engineer
• Cyber Security Manager / Administrator
• Information Assurance Engineer / Analyst
• Network Engineer / Architect
• Systems Engineer