If you hold the CISSP certification, you may have asked yourself “What’s next for me?” as far as your certification journey is concerned. For many professionals, the next step is one of the CISSP concentrations: architecture, engineering or management.

This year, the CISSP-ISSAP (Information Systems Security Architecture Professional) exam will be updated. The exam length (125 items in three hours) remains unchanged, as do the number of domains (six). However, the domains have been reordered and reweighted based on last year’s Job Task Analysis (JTA) which is a process by which professionals who hold the CISSP-ISSAP review the content of the exam and make recommendations to best align the exam’s domains with the current work performed by those in relevant roles. The CISSP-ISSAP is ideal for those working professionals in roles like security architect, chief technology officer, system/network designer, business analyst or chief security officer.

The only domain name change is to Infrastructure Security, which in October will become Infrastructure Security Architecture. The weight of that domain also increased from 19% to 21%. The other five domains also changed in terms of weight, but all by single percentage points.

The updates to the domains and their weights are noted below:

July 2017 – October 13, 2020
#	Domains	Weights
1	Identity and Access Management Architecture	19%
2	Security Operations Architecture	17%
3	Infrastructure Security	19%
4	Architect for Governance, Compliance, and Risk Management	16%
5	Security Architecture Modeling	14%
6	Architect for Application Security	15%
	Total:	100%

 

Effective October 14, 2020
#	Domains	Weights
1	Architecture for Governance, Compliance and Risk Management	17%
2	Security Architecture Modeling	15%
3	Infrastructure Security Architecture	21%
4	Identity and Access Management (IAM) Architecture	16%
5	Architect for Application Security	13%
6	Security Operations Architecture	18%
	Total:	100%

For more information on the upcoming updates to the CISSP-ISSAP exam, read our FAQs. You may also download both exam outlines; the one for the current version of the exam and the one that will take affect in October, on our website .