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SECCLO started in 2018, supported by the European Commission funding. The initial grant was for three annual intakes. Now, the recent award 4 million EUR covers four more annual intakes, with the last students to graduate in 2026. The new Erasmus Mundus funding includes 84 scholarships for outstanding European and non-European students for two-year studies in the programme. The European Commission selected 40 such programmes from 100 submitted proposals. SECCLO is a continuation to the very successful NordSecMob – Master’s Programme in Security and Mobile Computing, which ran for 10 years (2006–2015) with more than 200 graduates.

SECCLO focuses on two specific aspects of modern computing systems. The first is cloud computing: meaning highly distributed and scalable computation and data-storage in data centres as well as in physically accessible devices. The second area is information security: meaning the protection of computation, communication and data from unauthorized access and other threats caused by potentially malicious actors. Studies in the Security and Cloud Computing programme give the students a broad understanding of the latest and future technologies for secure cloud computing systems. Students gain both practical and theoretical knowledge into secure-systems engineering, distributed application development, network and service architectures, and cloud and mobile platforms. They can specialize in communications systems design, information security, reliable distributed systems, cryptography, or big data security.

“We believe in combining theoretical knowledge and security expertise with product development skills” says Professor Tuomas Aura, Director of SECCLO, “Our graduates have been very successful in finding employment in European companies and, in many cases, continue into doctoral programmes. This is a major effort to attract and educate bright young people, often with previous industry work experience, whose expertise is in high demand in Finland and the partner countries.”

The first year of the SECCLO programme is offered by Aalto University Department of Computer Science. The second year is completed at one of the consortium partner universities: KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden; The Norwegian University of Science and Technology; Technical University of Denmark; University of Tartu, Estonia; or EURECOM, France. Upon completion of the programme, the student receives a double degree.

In addition to university partners, the SECCLO consortium is strengthened with Associate Members including companies and research centers from several countries: F-Secure Corporation (Finland), Ericsson Oyj (Finland), KONE Oyj (Finland), VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, Intel Labs Europe (Germany), Nokia Bell Labs (France/Finland), Cybernetica AS, (Estonia), GuardTime (Estonia), RISE – Research Institutes of Sweden Security Lab, Intopalo Digital (Finland), SAP Labs (France), IKERLAN (Spain), Eficode Oyj (Finland), SINTEF (Norway), BMW Group (Germany).

“We are interested in enlarging the Associate Member network of industry and research collaborators to widen the employability opportunities for SECCLO students, and to get feedback from industry and research organizations to support the further development of the programme. SECCLO Associate Members and other companies are invited to offer internship and thesis positions to the students. We welcome also smaller companies and start-ups to join our network” says Eija Kujanpää, Coordinator of the SECCLO programme.

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