Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India and SAARC, Fortinet
During a career spanning over 24 years, Rajesh Maurya has held key positions in various organisations in the information security, network management and IT consulting space. After working with companies such as Sify and Microland, he joined Fortinet in 2004, where he is currently regional vice president, India and SAARC region. He has been instrumental in driving aggressive growth for the company, through market penetration and expansion of the channel network.
As per Maurya, just about every information security breach in the past 20 years has been the result of gaps in visibility, awareness and control. “If you can’t see what’s on your network, you can’t protect it. If you can see what’s connected but have no contextual awareness about what’s happening, you can’t protect it. And if you can detect and understand what’s happening but don’t have an integrated and automated way to respond, you still can’t protect it,” he says.
As for future trends, he believes security will be more integrated with networking and computing, all of which will be more distributed and accelerated with 5G and the mass implementation of smart solutions. “The third generation of security will see security being designed into solutions from the outset rather than a bolted-on afterthought. Security will also be more automated, leveraging AI and ML to analyse vast volumes of data for anomalous behaviour,” he says.
On his most memorable assignment, Maurya says signing up Tata Communications as a Fortinet MSSP partner was a particularly special one. “We were comparatively a lesser known vendor then, but jointly we were able to create a strong solution offering,” he says. Tata Communications Transformation Services Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of Tata Communications and Fortinet, is working together with Microsoft Azure and has recently launched a fully managed SD-WAN offering for Azure Virtual WAN.
Maurya says his team in India is his biggest strength. “I believe in giving people freedom to work, accepting the fact that I cannot be good at everything and allowing expertise to be delivered by people who are good in their respective roles.”
Maurya has a master’s degree in computer science. On the personal front, he says he enjoys spending quality time with his family, comprising his wife and their two children. “My wife runs a small business of her own, and multi tasks quite efficiently, managing both the house and her work,” he says.
