Information Security in India

Next week I’m going to be in India to visit our team in Hyderabad. Outside of Redmond, USA, Hyderabad is our largest presence that makes up about 20% of our overall globally distributed Information Security team. It’s always a blast for me to visit India and experience the incredible culture and have a chance to interact with the people.

We got started with our presence in India with vendors we brought on-board to assist with assessment work back in 2004. Even though application level core security skill sets were not prevalent, we found a way to on-board talented developers and IT pros that we could train up to identify security vulnerabilities in code. The vendor team started to grow rapidly and we clearly saw the potential to establish a more permanent team in India. But because of contractual constraints, we didn’t have the ability to convert the vendors to full-time staff (a great learning experience for future contractual agreements for me! :) ). It definitely took some patience but one by one, we were able to assemble a team of talented and driven individuals that today assist in all aspects of Information Security including development, assessment, training and remediation efforts. Over the course of four years the InfoSec India people have developed into a world class talented team led by Ravi Piduri.

The first two individuals we hired in India back in 2005 were Anmol Malhotra and Santosh Kandala who I’m pleased to say are still with Microsoft today and are continuing to do great work (Anmol moved to ACE team in Redmond and Santosh is with our partner security team Network Security working out of Hyderabad).

Here’s a recent picture of some of the folks from our team in India. More to come from my visit…

-Todd