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SSCP and SecurityX: An Administrator's Exam and an Architect's, Years Apart

SSCP asks for one year of experience; CompTIA recommends ten years in IT before SecurityX. Why they belong at different stages, and what each counts toward.

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Lisa Thompson
Security Training Director
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SSCP and SecurityX: An Administrator's Exam and an Architect's, Years Apart

A systems administrator with a year of security work can sit SSCP this month and hold it outright. CompTIA's advice for SecurityX, the exam called CASP+ until December 2024, is to wait for ten years in IT, five of them hands-on in security. The two sit years apart in a career, so the choice is about timing: SSCP now, and SecurityX later if your career stays on the engineering side.

What the two vendors publish

SSCPSecurityX
IssuerISC2CompTIA
FormatComputerized adaptive test; multiple choice and advanced item typesMultiple choice and performance-based items (CAS-005)
Questions100 to 125, including 25 unscored pretest itemsUp to 90
Time2 hoursUp to 165 minutes
Passing score700 out of 1000, shown as pass or failPass or fail only; no scaled score
Price$249 standard registration (Americas, Asia Pacific)$544 voucher (US list)
ExperienceOne year in one of seven domains or an accepted degree; otherwise Associate of ISC2None required; 10 years in IT including 5 in hands-on security recommended
Renewal$135 a year and 60 CPE credits per three years75 CEUs and a $150 fee per three years

Two stages of the same technical career

SSCP is for the person running the controls: the administrator who provisions accounts, reads firewall logs and patches endpoints, or the junior engineer and security operations center (SOC) analyst a year or two in. ISC2 requires a year of qualifying experience or an accepted degree, so the credential confirms that you meet its eligibility standard as well as passing the exam.

SecurityX is for the senior engineer or architect who decides where the controls go: placing the web application firewall and the API gateway, writing cloud identity policies, troubleshooting single sign-on when SAML breaks. CompTIA maps it to US Defense Department 8140 and NICE work roles including security architect and security control assessor. The experience is only a recommendation, so nothing stops a two-year administrator from booking CAS-005. The outline is the harder barrier.

Operating controls versus designing them

SSCP objectives ask you to implement, support, administer and operate: configure 802.1X and RADIUS, tune log collection, run a vulnerability scan through to remediation, support a disaster recovery drill. The seven domains are weighted between 9% and 16%, with cryptography lightest.

SecurityX objectives ask you to choose and fix. Of its 23 objectives, 17 open with "Given a scenario" and three more with "Given a set of requirements." Security Engineering carries 31%, the most of its four domains, and asks you to troubleshoot SAML, OAuth and Kerberos, work with hardware roots of trust such as TPMs and HSMs, and automate with Python, PowerShell and Bash. Its cryptography objective reaches post-quantum algorithms and homomorphic encryption, well past SSCP's treatment of PKI and secure protocols. Governance, risk and compliance takes 20%, including threat modeling with STRIDE and ATT&CK.

There's overlap in subject (identity, network security, cloud, incident response) but not in altitude. An SSCP question about access control asks how to run it well. A SecurityX question gives you a hybrid environment with conflicting requirements and asks which design meets them.

SecurityX reports pass or fail without a numeric score, so you cannot judge how close you came from a scaled result alone. ISC2's adaptive exam at least lists the domains where a failing SSCP candidate fell below proficiency.

What each counts toward

Both sit on ISC2's list of credentials that waive one year of the five CISSP requires. The waiver is one year however many listed credentials you hold, so holding both buys nothing extra there.

Renewal is a different story. CompTIA's list of outside certifications that renew SecurityX includes CISSP and ISC2's CGRC at 75 CEUs each, but not SSCP. In the other direction, keeping SecurityX current also renews any CySA+, PenTest+, Security+, Network+ or A+ you hold, which is a reason to choose it if you've collected CompTIA certifications along the way.

Both carry Defense Department recognition. ISC2 lists SSCP as approved under DoDM 8140.03, and CompTIA maps SecurityX to 8140 work roles, so on a defense contract each covers the role it was written for.

The years in between

Between one year of experience and ten, other certifications usually fit the job better. An administrator moving into detection can add CySA+, and our CySA+ and SecurityX comparison covers that step. Someone heading for architecture will find our analyst-to-architect path more useful than either exam's outline. Around the five-year mark, CISSP becomes available and competes with SecurityX for the same senior candidates.

Our view

Take SSCP when you have the year of experience and your work is administering security. Leave SecurityX until you're the person designing and troubleshooting other people's controls, and then weigh it against CISSP. We'd pick SecurityX over CISSP for an engineer who wants to stay hands-on and already holds CompTIA certifications to renew, and CISSP for anyone heading toward managing a program. A practitioner who sees SecurityX as a stretch goal worth sitting early could disagree, since CompTIA doesn't enforce the experience; we think a $544 pass/fail exam is an expensive way to find out you weren't ready.

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