Online Doctorate in Cybersecurity

This course presents techniques and methods for building a strategic security plan for an enterprise.  This includes identifying potential risk assessment strategies and identifying the approach to standards adoption, to align with business goals.   Enterprise security policy creation and implementation are also included in the student’s planning effort, as well as the Operations and Monitoring approach.  Finally, students will provide and audit an assessment plan, which includes taking compliance issues into consideration.  All of this security planning has the goal of bringing IT Security controls into alignment with business goals. 

Develops the skills in futuring through a variety of techniques. Introduces formal methods of innovation and diffusion of innovation.

This course explores the fundamental topics in digital systems security. Classical access control models and policies for a secure environment are analyzed. Current cryptographic algorithms are studied as means to ensure data confidentiality and integrity and for authentication. Techniques for secure software design, implementation and maintenance are discussed. Information assurance is examined as applied to the corporate environment. Malware attacks are examined and vulnerability analysis and risk assessment are discussed. Enterprise-level digital forensics is briefly discussed.

This course examines enterprise-level security architecture and its relationship to physical security. Security as related to service-oriented architecture (SOA), software-as-a-service (SaaS), business-to-business architectures, cloud computing and virtualization is covered. Topics include security infrastructure, policy and procedures, assessment, baselining and auditing. Secure communications, defense in depth, multiple security zones, multi-level security, cross-domain solutions and the unique challenges of advanced architectures are discussed.  Compliance with national and international laws and regulations is covered as well as certification and accreditation requirements. Special emphasis is paid to the interrelationship of the security strategic plan with the business strategic plan and the strategic plans of other corporate functional units.

This course presents an overview of the major structures, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley regulations and their impact on the enterprise. The course also explores governance and ethics relative to policies and control within the enterprise. In addition, topics such as trust, security, and privacy issues in enterprise computing and quality assurance issues in enterprise computing are closely examined.

This course focuses the student on a broad range of topics relative to managing security at the enterprise level. The intent is focusing on creating a security management framework, so that organizations can build up and sustain security for their enterprise. This approach integrates policies, best practices, guidelines, procedures, and regulations while incorporating a broad range of security topics. This broad outlook covers not only security but also any other risks to an organization’s core business relative to people, processes, data, facilities, and technology. This course examines external and internal security threats, failed systems development and system processes, employee mistakes and their respective risk mitigation.

This course provides a general understanding of both quantitative and qualitative methods within the context of research designs. Research design is the plan for the selection and application of accepted research practices. Research methods provide models for the appropriate collection, organization and analysis of data for decision-making, replication, and contribution to a knowledge base. Additionally, this course supports doctoral students’ abilities to demonstrate an understanding of the research purpose, nature and forms of research design and their relationship to research questions, methods for data collection and data analyses.

This course examines the fundamental principles of qualitative inquiry differentiating among various qualitative research designs.  Includes active engagement and practice with capturing qualitative data including being a participant observer and an interviewer. Students will learn how to minimize threats to the internal validity of qualitative studies, focusing on specific techniques for interpretation of data that contributes to the authenticity of qualitative studies.

Students will learn fundamental concepts of designing, collecting and assessing quantitative data. The course covers descriptive measures as well as various forms of probability and inferential analysis. Exploration of multivariate statistics will be practiced via large datasets using statistical analysis software.

RES863 is the third course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course: clarifies the research focus, defines the research question(s)/objective/hypotheses, produces a review of the literature.

RES864 is the fourth course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course requires: fine tuning the research question(s)/objective/hypotheses, strengthening the review of the literature, drafting a methods chapter (min), and drafting a chapter one. Students may surpass this description as they are able.

RES865 is the fifth course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course requires the student to focus on: producing a defense-ready draft of Chapters 1, 2 & 3 (the research proposal), undertaking the Proposal Defense, undertaking modifications required by the dissertation committee, achieving an approved IRB application.

RES866 is the sixth course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course requires the student to focus on: undertaking the Proposal Defense, undertaking modifications required by the dissertation committee, achieving an approved IRB application, proceeding with Data Collection and Analysis.

RES867 is the seventh course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course requires the student to focus on: proceeding with Data Collection and Analysis, working on initial drafting of chapters 4 & 5, and preparing for Final Defense.  Course is pass/fail.

RES868 is the eighth course of eight research and writing courses that result in a dissertation. Each term, the student progresses toward the completion of the dissertation by completing required elements of the dissertation process. This course requires the student to focus on: completing Data Collection and Analysis as needed, completing work on chapters 4 &5, undertaking the Final Defense, modifying document as required by the committee, editing of final document for publishing, and University sign off.  Course is pass/fail.