Her Story
About Sayali
I started my career in 2012 as a programmer analyst at a global multinational back in India, where I was developing applications in Java and .NET. While coding and developing several applications, I got introduced to secure coding methodologies, the OWASP Top 10 for APIs and application security. I realized that rather than just developing the application, it's important to have it secure by design right at the beginning. This shift-left approach, which is a common term now, wasn't so common back then, but that's when I realized it's very important to develop your application secure by design and be an enabler, not a blocker after the application is live. That led me to dive more into cybersecurity. I started with on-premises security when there was no cloud, no AI. There were huge data servers, mainframe, DB2, UDB, and we had to set security standards for on-premises with network firewalls. The technology was different back then, more manual, but it was interesting at the same time. The threats have been evolving, but they have always been there, and that's why I think this role is very important to secure your applications, your data, your information, your identity. I became a security analyst, then a cybersecurity consultant, and now I'm an advisor in cybersecurity engineering. I've worked in seven organizations so far. My key responsibility has always been leading large-scale security initiatives for multiple clients and organizations, helping them strengthen their security resilience in this evolving, complex threat landscape. Threats evolve every single day, so we need to keep ahead of them and not just play catch-up. I focus on risk management for enterprises, developing security strategies, and designing properly configured security architectures. Basically, I enable secure by design applications and architectures for organizations and clients.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Sayali
01What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I tell everybody, don't chase tools, just understand the systems. Understand the process, the data flows, trust boundaries in any system, not just the tools, because the tools are going to change, the technology is going to change, but the fundamentals always remain the same. Don't chase the tools, understand the basics, the fundamentals of the system, and learn how things can break, and not just how they work, so that you can fix them. What is very important in our field is people should be comfortable being uncomfortable. You will feel behind a lot, because there's so much happening, it's evolving every day, so you have to upskill yourself every single day, understand, upskill, and not get comfortable in the technology, because it's so dynamic.
02What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge is that cybersecurity is so dynamic and evolving that you cannot rest. You have to be there on your toes all the time. There could be an incident at 2AM at night, or 3AM at night, and you have to be there to troubleshoot and resolve it. It's not a 9-to-5, so to say. It depends on role to role also, but because it is so dynamic and so complex, you have to be there all the time, think about it, and work on it and act on it immediately. It cannot wait. It's like how a doctor performs surgeries. A person gets a heart attack at any time, so a system can get a heart attack at any time, and you have to be there to fix it.
03What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The first value that comes to me, apart from my own personal values, is ethics. Having ethics in my field and in any field is very important in general, but in cybersecurity, it's more so important because we can do everything that a bad actor, a malicious actor or a hacker could do. Not using those skills to exploit, and using them for the benefit of society is very important. Ethics comes number one as a value or model in cybersecurity, because we know how to get the data or information, and not using it to exploit or to create vulnerabilities or to cause harm or damage to the system or society is very important.
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