History of CCSP

CCSP (Certified Cloud Security Professional) was co-created by two organisations: (ISC)² and CSA (Cloud Security Alliance). (ISC)² is a membership organisation for cybersecurity professionals, while CSA is dedicated to raising awareness of best practices for secure cloud computing. Together, they first announced CCSP at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, California on April 21, 2015, with the exam being made available in July of that year.

At the time of CCSP’s launch, there was only one other major cloud security certification, CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge). While comprehensive, CCSK does not have any experience requirements, making it purely knowledge-based. CCSP, on the other hand, requires extensive experience with IT security and cloud computing, making it an effective way of proving both knowledge and practical capability.

In addition, CCSP builds on and complements (ISC)²’s existing cybersecurity certifications like CISSP, taking some of the general management concepts from that certification while applying them specifically to cloud security strategy and architecture.

In August 2019, the CCSP exam was updated for the first time to reflect continuing education requirements and the shifting roles and responsibilities of current cloud security professionals. As well as making some changes to the content, this update changed some of the domain names and weightings. In addition, the exam time was shortened from 4 hours to 3 hours.