Graduate Certificate in Cybersecurity Management

The Graduate Certificate in Cybersecurity Management (GCCM) is designed to provide foundational education in cybersecurity leadership. The certificate coursework empowers developing leaders to design, implement, and operate a security program intended to reduce risk of compromising an organization’s data. Graduate students who obtain this certificate will be better equipped to aid in the design, operation, and monitoring of security controls to protect corporate and consumer data in an age of ever-increasing aggression and sophistication.

Certificate electives and faculty are shared with the Master of Science in Cybersecurity Management (MSCM) program and provide the same high level of instruction and interaction. If you have questions, please contact the academic advisor of your graduate program.

Curriculum
  • The certificate requires 15 credit hours of coursework.
  • All credits must be completed within three years.
  • Certificate credits can cross-count toward your graduate program requirements.
  • Grades, credits, and the certificate will appear on an official university transcript.
  • A 3.0 cumulative GPA in certificate courses is required for successful completion of the certificate.
Core Courses

Course Number: IS 6570
Credits: 3

Properly designed and implemented information security is essential to protecting corporate data assets. This course covers the broad topic of cybersecurity with details including; access control, network security, operating systems security, software security, physical security, workforce security, security management, and regulatory compliance. Theoretical understanding is supported by the hands-on implementation of cybersecurity controls.

Course Number: ​IS 6572
Credits: 3

Robust cybersecurity programs ensure strong network defenses and well-established security operations to detect and respond to attackers. This course focuses on the technical aspects of daily network operations such as firewalls, intrusion detection, malware detection, activity logging and analysis, SIEMs, threat intelligence, threat hunting, security operations centers (SOC), and incident response.

Course Number: IS 6573
Credits: 3

Proactively managing vulnerabilities in information technology is essential to reducing the risk of data being compromised. This course first reviews the tactics, techniques, and procedures that attackers use to exploit vulnerabilities. The course then discusses strategies for eliminating vulnerabilities and techniques for deploying safeguards to reduce the risk of inherent vulnerabilities.

Course Number: ​IS 6574
Credits: 3

Successful security programs utilize risk management techniques to make effective security control decisions. Regulations, such as GDPR, force companies into adopting security best practices to protect sensitive data. This course covers many compliance and risk management topics, which are necessary to understand in order to be an effective cybersecurity leader and build an effective cybersecurity program.

Admission Requirements
  • Applicants must be current graduate students at the University of Utah.
  • Applicants must have a minimum 3.0 undergraduate GPA or a minimum 3.0 GPA in their current graduate program.
  • Courses may have individual pre-requisites.
  • A GMAT/GRE score is not required.
Application Deadlines
  • Students must apply for the certificate at least one semester prior to the semester in which they will graduate.
  • Applications are accepted throughout the year and reviewed on a rolling basis.
  • Students may start the program in Fall, Spring, or Summer semester.
Elective Courses

Course Number: ​IS 6410
Credits: 3

Modern organizations operate on computer-based information systems, from day-to-day operations to corporate governance. This course introduces a systemic way of planning, analyzing, designing, and implementing a computer-based information system for automating and enhancing business processes in organizations. In this course, we learn the systems analysis and design methodology as well as techniques and tools for analyzing, modeling, and designing information systems.

Course Number: OSC 6660
Credits: 3

Project management has become the way of life in many industries. Whether it is development of a new product, organizational-wide implementation of a new IT tool, or execution of a merger, project management skills are required to manage cross-functional teams subject to strict deadlines and tight budget constraints. In this course we discuss all three phases of project management: project conception, execution, and closure. Issues related to project leadership, budgeting, and scheduling will be addressed in the course, and case discussions will highlight state of the art project management practices. Project management software will be introduced (possibly including group project using MS Project Software).

Course Number: MGT 6540
Credits: 1.5

The purpose of this course is to help students understand the ethical problems that confront managers and to approach their role as leaders with a sense of purpose and vision. The course explores students’ own ethical orientations, the values of practicing managers, and alternative approaches to ethical problems. Representative topics include making choices about influencing and obeying the law, profits versus other values, the relationship between the interests of individuals and groups, how corporate policies affect the ethical choices of individuals, and criteria for making ethical decisions. The course follows a practical and effective model for analyzing ethical dilemmas in the work place in order to reach optimal decisions.

Course Number: IS 6641
Credits: 3

Cloud Computing is a fundamental component of modern IT infrastructure and application design. This course focuses on the advanced skills that are required to design and implement public, private or hybrid Cloud Computing environments. The topics covered include large scale visualization, application platforms and advanced IT infrastructure components. Theoretical understanding is supported by extensive hands-on work implementing the concepts in a lab environment. Recommended prerequisite of IS 6640: Networking & Servers.

Course Number: IS 6640
Credits: 3

An introduction to the design, operation, and management of IT systems including Windows Server, cloud services, and networking. This course provides instruction in data communications and computer network definitions, concepts, and principles, including (but not limited to); topologies; protocols; standards; and fundamental concepts related to data communication networks, such as routers, switches, and cabling; Windows Server technologies including Server install and configuration, Active Directory, DHCP/DNS, and Group Policy Objects. This technology-intensive course includes hands-on labs working with networks, Windows Server, and cloud services. It prepares students to make intelligent and informed decisions about data network design/management, by analyzing the benefits, drawbacks, effects, tradeoffs, and compromises related to various data communication technologies. You will learn how to make policy, design, and installation decisions.

Course Number: IS 6465
Credits: 3

The objective of the course is to provide knowledge and skills needed to create Web-based applications. It covers a broad set of technologies and tools that have led to the successful use of the World Wide Web for various businesses. This includes Java programming, JSP, HTML, XML, HTTP, Web servers and databases.

Course Number: IS 6484
Credits: 3

This course covers issues, methods and applications of large-scale database systems. Topics include administration and management of database, data warehouse and ERP systems, advanced SQL programming, distributed, multimedia and web data management as well as optimization of query processing, ETL and storage management.

Course Number: CS 6490
Credits: 3

Comprehensive introduction to the principles and practices of network security, especially Internet security. Topics to be covered include cryptography, authentication, access control, web security, denial of service, digital pests, anonymity, and intrusion detection. Existing network security standard will be used for case studies.

Course Number: IS 6420
Credits: 3

Advanced topics in database theory and design, including hands-on development of a working database system. Topics covered include the relational database model, foundations in relational algebra, design techniques, SQL, distributed databases, multimedia databases, and knowledge bases.

Course Number: IS 6480
Credits: 3

The data generated from ongoing operations of businesses and not-for-profit enterprises continues to grow. Using the data to diagnose problems and assess opportunities is becoming more and more of a competitive advantage in today’s business environment. Before analysis can take place, existing data must be modeled in ways that facilitate reporting. This course briefly presents the data models of existing operational systems and then contrasts those models to dimensional models used in data warehouses and analytic processing engines. Business reporting needs are analyzed, data warehouses are modeled based on the reporting needs, and then SQL is used to create and populate tables based on dimensional models. Once in place, the data warehouse is used as a backend for a reporting tool to create reports that answer business questions.

Course Number: IS 6481
Credits: 3

This course introduces database technologies for building scalable data warehouse systems and technologies for user-oriented, interactive data analysis. Data warehouse systems differ from on-line transaction processing systems in time span and access mode of the data, and in query types and purposes.

Course Number: IS 6482
Credits: 3

This course introduces data mining technologies that assist in discovery of reliable, understandable and useful patterns in structured, semi-structured and unstructured data. Students will practice core data mining technologies, analyze cases, and explore real world applications and issues.

Course Number: IS 6483
Credits: 3

This course covers advanced data and web mining methods and software tools for customer segmentation, recommendations, personalization, fraud detection, time series analysis, social network analysis as well as web content matching and extraction. Special attention will be given to imbalanced data mining, cost-oriented classification and privacy-preserving data mining issues and methods. Students will collect and analyze real world data using available data mining software or programming tools.

Course Number: ​IS 6571
Credits: 3

Examines computer forensics and investigations. It looks at the problems and concerns related to computer investigations. It blends traditional investigation methods with classic systems-analysis problem solving techniques and applies them to computing investigations. It implements common computer forensic tools in real-life scenarios.

Course Number: CS 6340
Credits: 3

The goals for this course are to study: (1) algorithms and methods for building computational models of natural language understanding, including syntactic analysis, semantic representations, discourse analysis, and statistical and corpus-based methods for text processing and knowledge acquisition, (2) issues involved in natural language understanding, such as cognitive and linguistic phenomena, and (3) applications that can benefit from natural language processing, such as information extraction, question answering, machine translation, and spoken language understanding.

Course Number: CS 6350
Credits: 3

This course covers techniques for developing computer programs that can acquire new knowledge automatically or adapt their behavior over time. Topics include several algorithms for supervised and unsupervised learning, decision trees, online learning, linear classifiers, empirical risk minimization, computational learning theory, ensemble methods, Bayesian methods, clustering and dimensionality reduction.