The department of Computer Science and Engineering at IIT Kanpur has been offering a good number of courses in Cyber Security related subjects for the last 4 years. Multiple faculty members in the department are engaged in research projects related to cyber security. Therefore, the department feels that it has a the faculty strength to create new degree programs specializing in cyber security.

Simultaneously, the NASSCOM projects that the country needs cyber security professionals in large numbers – approximately 1 million currently. These professionals also need to have varying degrees of expertise, in order to fulfill their job obligations. The possible roles in cyber security jobs are cyber vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT) engineers, security operations center (SoC) analysts, security strategists, developers of cyber security tools and technologies, cyber security policy developers, researchers, and chief information security officers (CISO)s etc.

Additionally, a number of Army and Navy officials have personally visited IIT Kanpur, and requested that specialized Masters programs in Cyber Security be offered to defense personnel who upon completion of their degrees here – could join various positions at the defense CERT (Computer Emergency Response Team), the WESEE (Weapons and Electronics Engineering Center, Indian Navy), the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) , Defense Cyber Agency (DCyA) etc., where cyber security professionals are urgently required.

While the CSE Department of IIT Kanpur already decided to offer MTech, MS, and BT-MT specializations in Cyber Security from July 2021, these on campus programs will be capacity limited in terms of number of students that can be accommodated. On the other hand, the demand from working professionals who wish to pursue a cyber security career is much more than our on-campus cyber security masters programs can handle. This motivated the department of CSE to enlarge the scope of the cyber security knowledge sharing by also introducing an e-Masters program.