If you want to score a high-paying job these days, your best bet is to turn to the IT industry. This career path tends to offer some great opportunities, whether it be concerning the salary or otherwise. Today, in this cybersecurity salary article, I would like to tell you about a job that is often overlooked.
When we think about IT, the most common things that come to mind are often software or web development, programming and coding, data management, etc. However, cyber (information) security and analysis is just as important of a job as the ones mentioned above. Furthermore, people say that it may also easily compare salary-wise.
At the very beginning of this cybersecurity job salary tutorial, I’ll tell you about the job title itself. We’ll briefly go over what it entails, what different information security jobs are there, what do these professionals do for a living, etc.
Once that is said and done with, we’ll also shortly go over the main types of cybersecurity experts that are out there. We’ll do this so that you could get a better picture of why the cybersecurity salary is what it is. Finally, we’ll move on to discussing the salary itself.
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Understanding Cybersecurity Analyst Job
So then, let’s take it from the top. Who is the typical cybersecurity analyst and what does this person do?
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Cybersecurity analysts are mostly concerned with networks. This is sort of implied in the job title itself. These people have a very wide range of responsibilities, though, and all of them revolve around keeping a specific network safe, up and running.
First of all, the main priority of these people is to closely observe company-specific networks and to maintain a high level of security. This can be done in a wide variety of ways, such as applying penetration testing, educating the rest of the company's staff about security-based software, observing the industry trends and being able to apply them in the workplace, and so on. If and when something does go wrong, however, it is the responsibility of cybersecurity analysts and engineers to fix the problem. This mostly concerns engineers, but analysts may also get involved.
While engineers are concerned with actually fixing the problem, information analysts have to identify the issue, investigate and document it, and work together with the whole security team to ensure that such a problem does not repeat itself. While there are very specific differences between information analysts and engineers (i.e. the cybersecurity analyst salary is different from the cybersecurity engineer salary), these two professions may overlap in some companies.
With all of that said, you should now have a pretty good idea of what information analysts do. Now, before moving on to the cybersecurity salary, let’s talk about the different groups of information analysts that there are.
Different Types of Cyber Security Analysts
Different jobs have different titles attached to them. These titles are used mainly to identify a person’s skill level and experience in that specific line of work. However, they are also important when it comes to the whole working process itself. Let me give you an example.
Imagine that you’re an employer of a small start-up company. You meet, interview and hire two people, both for the designer job position. However, one of those people has ten years of experience working as a designer, for multiple different companies, while the other is fresh out of the university and this is his or her first job. Needless to say, you will probably want to pay these people different salaries that would be in line with their experience, but this is not where the differences end.
The two new employees would probably perform different tasks, all of which would be comfortable for their skill level and experience. Furthermore, you might want to focus on more learning-based tasks when it comes to the newbie and assign the more difficult, deadline-specific tasks to the experienced designer.
The industry newcomer would possess the job title of an “entry-level designer”, while the person with ten years of experience would be called either a “junior designer” or perhaps even a “senior” one. As you can see, these titles make a pretty significant difference - the same applies to the information analyst job. And the differences don’t only stop at the cybersecurity salary!
That being said, let’s briefly analyze the three main groups of cybersecurity analysts mentioned above. Once you have a thorough understanding of how these three groups are different from one another (and what different responsibilities and requirements they offer), we’ll be able to move on to discussing the cybersecurity analyst salary.
Entry-Level Cyber Security Analyst
The entry-level (also sometimes referred to as the “beginner”) cybersecurity analyst group can be seen as the most optimistic and motivational group out of the three. This is because most of the people that fall into this category are still very young and don’t have any experience of working in a real job. They might be driven by the cybersecurity analyst salary or the cybersecurity engineer salary, or might have a genuine passion for cybersecurity, in general. Whatever the case might be, there are new people like this coming into the industry every single day.
Entry-level cybersecurity analysts often have generally simple, very learning-based jobs. Since it’s the absolute beginning of their careers, both these people and their employers know and understand that these beginners still have very much to learn. That’s why some companies even offer training programs for new, entry-level employees - that’s a really good way to start!
When it comes to the entry-level cybersecurity salary, things can go two ways. On one hand, if a beginner information analyst manages to find a stable, long-term job in a company, he or she will probably receive a minimum cybersecurity salary that will grow with time, assuming that they will also work hard and learn quickly. On the other hand, a lot of beginner cybersecurity analysts don’t get paid at all. This is because many beginners have to get a certain amount of hours worked in a company for their university credits. Often, these practices are not paid - it does, however, depend on the company and university in question.
Junior Cyber Security Analyst
The junior cybersecurity analyst is usually the typical person that you would imagine when you hear the phrase “information analyst”. These are people who have either recently acquired their university degrees in computer science (or any other related field of expertise) or have finished some sort of an individual learning program with a certificate and are now looking for a stable job. Junior analysts, as opposed to entry-level ones, often have some experience in the field - they have either worked some odd jobs related to the subject in question or have participated in some projects or anything of the similar kind. Whatever the case might be, the point is that junior information analysts usually already know what they’re doing, at least to an extent.
Actual workflow-wise, the junior group of people handles the most common, every-day tasks that their employers might assign to them. These tasks are usually less learning-based than the ones issued to beginner analysts, but they still offer valuable new information. Furthermore, junior cybersecurity analysts require a lot less supervision when compared to their less-experienced peers - they have more room to think of their solutions to potential problems, and to then experiment with their implementation.
The junior cybersecurity analyst salary is a complicated topic to deal with. This, however, isn’t a unique feature exclusive to this profession - in almost every line of work, the junior group is the most difficult to analyze. Why? One word - overlap.
Since the junior group is in the middle between the beginner and the senior ones, there’s bound to be some confusion as to when a beginner becomes a junior, or a junior becomes a senior. This mostly because there are no clearly defined boundaries separating the groups - it’s all situation, company, and context-dependent.
With that in mind, you can probably understand why the junior cybersecurity salary tends to be very inconsistent. Admittedly, that’s true with most of the salaries on this list (they are all volatile, thus being very prone to change), but it’s especially evident with the junior group of information analysts.
Senior Cyber Security Analysts
The final group of the three main types of information analysts, the senior workers are the biggest professionals in the field.
Senior cybersecurity analysts are often the leaders of their own, respective teams. They work with maintaining the networks from a high-profile type of environment. This means that the daily tasks that these people deal with are rather complex and require a whole team of professionals to manage. Furthermore, in addition to pen-testing and issue solving, senior information analysts are often assigned with the task of mentoring the newcomers to the company. This is common practice, however - these things happen in most lines of work.
When talking about the senior cybersecurity analyst salary or the senior cybersecurity engineer's salary, it is worth mentioning that these workers get paid the biggest amount of money in this industry. That might be a no-brainer, though, since they are the best that this industry has to offer.
At this point, you should have a pretty good idea about the different types of cybersecurity analysts that there are, and about the varying cybersecurity jobs salary. However, knowing that the cybersecurity salary can vary isn’t enough - you came here for the numbers. And numbers are exactly what we’re going to discuss next.
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Cyber Security Salary
Let me just quickly emphasize that the salaries provided below are just estimations that can change at any given point in time. They should be used as a reference, rather than a cold, indisputable fact.
Entry-Level Salary
Let’s begin by talking about the entry-level cybersecurity salary. As I’ve mentioned earlier on in the article, the beginner cybersecurity salary depends on a few different variables - these variables can influence the number to be both much smaller and much bigger, so do keep that in mind.
Although it’s really difficult to find a stable, specific number to reference, Businessinsider.com states that the average cybersecurity salary revolves around the $84,000 annually mark. This would equate to approximately $7000 per month!
Honestly, keeping everything in mind, this turns out to be an amazing salary! These estimations are based in the US, where the average monthly salary is around $3700 (as of writing this article). When you consider this fact, the beginner cybersecurity salary seems even more awesome.
Junior Salary
As stated earlier, the junior cybersecurity salary is a difficult thing to analyze. Still, Ziprecruiter.com does provide a specific number that you could reference when thinking about the junior group of analysts.
According to the site, junior cybersecurity analysts should make around $88,800 per year or $7402 per month.
This makes perfect sense, especially when you compare this junior cybersecurity salary to the beginner one.
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Senior Salary
According to ZipRecruiter, a senior cybersecurity analyst can expect to make around $118,600 per year. This comes out to be a jaw-dropping $9,889 per month!
That a huge jump from the expected salary of the junior group! With this information, it would make sense to think that the senior information analyst requirements are much higher when compared to those of a junior one.
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Conclusions
In this article, we have covered all of the essential information about the cybersecurity salary. You should now have a better idea of not only the salaries that cybersecurity analysts make but also about the different kinds of analysts that there are, as well as their job descriptions (albeit very short ones).
I honestly hope that the information provided in this cybersecurity job salary article was useful to you and that you’ve found what you were looking for. Thank you for reading, and don’t hesitate to check out some other salary-related articles on this page! Cheers!
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