Kartik Shahani, Vice-President of India & SAARC, CrowdStrike
Kartik Shahani, Vice-President of India & SAARC, CrowdStrike, brings more than three decades of leadership experience, driving profitable business growth, sales operations excellence, and regional market expansion for global technology leaders. In his current role, Shahani leads CrowdStrike’s regional go-to-market strategy to accelerate customer adoption of the CrowdStrike Falcon platform. Prior to joining CrowdStrike, Shahani held senior sales and channel leadership roles at companies including Tenable, Dell EMC, IBM and McAfee.
Commenting on the sophisticated threat landscape Indian organisations face, Shahani says, “The 2026 CrowdStrike Global Threat Report reveals that attacks now break out – from initial compromise to lateral movement across systems – at an average of 29 minutes and the fastest attacks in just 27 seconds. Adversaries are weaponising AI across every stage of the attack chain to move faster than ever, often leveraging AI for highly convincing social engineering campaigns that fuel identity-driven attacks. Once inside, attackers move laterally across identities, endpoints and cloud environments, evading detection by blending in with normal operational traffic. This shift to identity-driven attacks is highlighted by 82 per cent of detections now being malware-free, up from 51 per cent in 2020.”
To respond to attacks in real time, Shahani shares that organisations must advance beyond manual operations to machine-speed defense with an AI-powered security platform that unifies visibility and protection across domains. He says organisations’ AI adoption is also being targeted, “Adversaries are also actively targeting the AI tools and systems transforming how work gets done with prompt injection attacks that hijack agents, manipulate outcomes and access sensitive data. Organisations need real-time protection for the AI interaction layer, provided by an AI Detection and Response capability, to secure prompts, responses, and agent actions.” Shahani highlights the growing threats facing the telecom industry, with CrowdStrike’s 2026 GTR stating that telecommunication was the sixth most targeted industry in 2025, with Chinese-nexus adversaries increasing their telecommunications intrusions by 30 per cent year on year. He explains, “Telecommunications organisations are an attractive target for nation-state adversaries in conducting surveillance, economic espionage, and supporting their technology transfer objectives. CrowdStrike has observed this activity particularly from China-nexus adversaries, with these intelligence collection activities aligned to the strategic priorities of the Chinese Communist Party.”
