Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)

Every high-profile data breach and headline-generating hack encourages solution providers to look harder for engineers with security prowess.

This vendor-agnostic certification offered by non-profit International Information System Security Certification Consortium, (ISC)², is a good place to start validating employee skills.

"It certainly piggybacks on the cachet of the flagship CISSP [Certified Information Systems Security Professional] certification and the venerable reputation of (ISC)²," said Mike Barkett, CTO at Sycomp, a solutions provider based in Foster City, Calif.

Like the CISSP badge, CCSP doesn’t prove anything about hands-on experience, instead indicating a broad mastery of the main concepts of the industry, explained Barkett.

"In the case of cloud security, in 2017, those concepts and the jargon to describe them, are primordial at best," Barkett said.

The average salary for someone in the U.S. with a CCSP certification is $120,103, according to the 2017 IT Skills and Salary Survey conducted by Cary, N.C.-based business training and certification company Global Knowledge.