Category: Thought Leader
Name: Saryu Nayyar
Title: CEO and founder
Company: Gurucul
Why nominated: Gurucul CEO and published author Saryu Nayyar has built a whole company around her belief that analytics can be applied to identities for the purpose of monitoring behaviors and detecting advanced security threats.
Profile: Nayyar's understanding that the rise of cloud applications and mobile computing has caused the security perimeter to disappear and made identity a new threat vector drives much of her work as the CEO at Gurucul, the company she founded to provide user and entity behavior analytics, identity analytics, fraud analytics and cloud security analytics solutions that use machine learning and predictive anomaly detection algorithms to reduce an organization's attack surface and detect malicious activity.
This past April, she published the second edition of “Borderless Behavior Analytics – Who's Inside? What're They Doing?” – a book she authored, featuring the contributions of 12 CISO and CIO leaders who share their insights on how identity has become an emerging threat vector that must be managed, especially as traditional security perimeters protecting enterprises vanish.
Saryu was previously a founding member of Vaau, an enterprise role-management start-up acquired by Sun Microsystems, and has held leadership roles in product strategy for both Sun and Oracle and Sun Microsystems. An advocate for women in technology, Nayyar was named a 2017 EY Entrepreneurial Winning Woman by EY, where she had several years in senior positions within the IT security practice.
What colleagues say: "Saryu is one of the most effective entrepreneurs, business leaders and technologists I have encountered in my career. Her vision for identifying market opportunities and building advanced technologies to address them is second to none."
- Leslie K. Lambert, chief security and strategy officer, Gurucul
