The CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional) is an international, vendor-neutral certification administered by the International Information Systems Security Certification Consortium, also known as (ISC)2. The CISSP validates an IT security professional's deep technical and managerial knowledge and experience to effectively design, engineer, implement and manage their overall information security program to protect organizations from growing sophisticated attacks. To obtain the CISSP certification, candidates must pass a rigorous exam that covers various domains including security and risk management, asset security, security architecture and engineering, communication and network security, identity and access management, security assessment and testing, security operations, and software development security.