Challenges With Securing Container Environments – Badri Raghunathan, Sumedh Thakar – PSW #674

As CEO, Sumedh leads the company’s vision, strategic direction and implementation. He joined Qualys in 2003 in engineering and grew within the company, taking various leadership roles focused on helping Qualys deliver on its platform vision. Since 2014, he has served as Chief Product Officer at Qualys, where he oversaw all things product, including engineering, development, product management, cloud operations, DevOps, and customer support. A product fanatic and engineer at heart, he is a driving force behind expanding the platform from Vulnerability Management into broader areas of security and compliance, helping customers consolidate their security stack. This includes the rollout of the game-changing VMDR (Vulnerability Management, Detection and Response) that continually detects and prevents risk to their systems, Multi-Vector EDR, which focuses on protecting endpoints as well as Container Security, Compliance and Web Application Security solutions. Sumedh was also instrumental in the build-up of multiple Qualys sites resulting in a global 24×7 follow-the-sun product team.

Sumedh is a long-time proponent of SaaS and cloud computing. He previously worked at Intacct, a cloud-based financial and accounting software provider. He also worked at Northwest Airlines developing complex algorithms for its yield and revenue management reservation system. Sumedh has a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering with distinction from the University of Pune.

Badri Raghunathan is a director of product management at Qualys, responsible for spearheading Qualys’ product initiatives around cloud-native infrastructure (containers, serverless). A technology entrepreneur at heart, Badri thrives on understanding customer problems, building differentiated products, and taking them to market. Badri has worked in product and engineering management roles in a variety of industries, including security, networking and consumer electronics. Most recently, Badri was a founder at an early stage cloud DevSecOps startup, and prior to that, he led cloud-based security and networking products at companies like Symantec and Cisco. Badri holds 9 U.S. patents and has several more applications in the pipeline. He holds an MBA from the University of California Berkeley, and M.S. and B.S. degrees in electrical engineering from Oklahoma State University and the University of Madras respectively.