Exclusive Interview with Kartik Shahani, Country Manager of Tenable India

Kartik Shahani explains the importance of cybersecurity in an organization

Continuous advancements in technologies and the internet are increasing the need for cybersecurity to protect confidential data from the hands of cybercriminals. The global cybersecurity market is expected to hit US$345.4 billion in 2026 with a CAGR of 9.7%.

Here is an exclusive interview with Kartik Shahani, Country Manager of Tenable India, who explains the need for cybersecurity to prevent potential cyberattacks and protect confidential data to drive revenue in the future.

1. Kindly brief us about your role at Tenable and your journey in this highly promising sector.

Kartik Shahani is the Country Manager of Tenable India. The cybersecurity landscape in India has changed a lot since I first started working in the industry. Back then, cybersecurity was not an investment priority for organizations. While security experts spoke about the importance of cyber resilience, no one really understood its significance. All of this changed quickly since the COVID-19 pandemic. With organizations taking a digital-first approach, the threat landscape has atomized overnight leaving businesses exposed to more attack vectors. A single cyberattack can have a lasting impact on an organization. This has forced organizations to view cybersecurity as a business imperative. In my current role at Tenable, the team helps organizations manage, measure, and reduce their cyber risk by taking a risk-based approach to vulnerability management and adopting a shift-left approach to cloud security.

2. Kindly brief us about Tenable, its specialization, and the services that your company offers.

At Tenable, the team continues to build on expertise as a leader in vulnerability management solutions providing wide visibility across the modern attack surface. The company observes two trends taking place in the market— the first is that organizations want the ability to quickly spin up and connect modern assets to the corporate environment. With expanding attack surfaces and increasing attack vectors, cybersecurity professionals face an unprecedented number of challenges in building and maturing effective risk-based vulnerability management programs. These hurdles are further complicated by the proliferation of single-purpose technologies adopted to solve one problem at a time. Tenable launched Tenable.ep, the industry's first, comprehensive risk-based vulnerability management platform designed to assess all assets and vulnerabilities across organizations' entire attack surface, all in a unified view. It enables organizations to know the cyber exposure of every asset, on any platform, at all times, and evolve from compliance-driven attempts to fix everything to a risk-based approach that focuses time and resources on fixing what matters most.

The second trend is the rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies at exponential rates and the responsibilities of modern security teams that continue to evolve and increase in complexity— the pressure to meet workload demands while minimizing security risks continues to mount. Implementing a new framework allows organizations to remain agile while strengthening security is key. This is why the company recently announced new capabilities for Tenable's cloud-native application security platform known as Tenable.cs. Tenable.cs enables organizations to programmatically detect and fix cloud infrastructure misconfigurations in the design, build, and runtime phases of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC). This helps to prevent unresolved insecure configuration or exploitable vulnerabilities from reaching production.

3. Tell us how your company is contributing to the IoT/big data analytics /cloud computing industry of the nation and how the company is benefiting from the clients.

The innovative Cyber Exposure platform leverages machine learning to automatically correlate vulnerability and threat data together. It also assesses the criticality of threats to assets on a single platform. This enables customers to calculate, communicate, and compare their cyber exposure and manage the risk accordingly. Organizations can quantify their cyber exposure, track risk reduction over time, and compare cyber exposure among peers.

Tenable.cs uses machine learning to identify and patch vulnerabilities and misconfigurations at the time of writing the code itself. This adds an added layer of security as the infrastructure is secure by design so security teams and developers do not have to deal with vulnerabilities in the software at runtime. This enables organizations to take a more proactive approach to cybersecurity.

4. How is Tenable helping customers deliver relevant business outcomes through the adoption of the company's technology innovations?

The trend recurring in India is that cybersecurity is viewed from a compliance perspective. Compliance measures are important for defining cybersecurity best practices but they don't help organizations quantify or assess risk. Tenable enables organizations to take a risk-based approach to vulnerability management. This helps customers understand the full context of each vulnerability, including the most critical assets that are affected along with an assessment of current and future attacker activity. Rather than viewing cybersecurity as a compliance checkbox measure, Tenable solutions enable organizations to take a more proactive rather than reactive approach to cybersecurity— be it to quantify cyber risk, secure the active directory, or address misconfigurations at the speed of the cloud.

5. The future of IoT/ ML /cloud computing in India.

In the latest budget, the Union Government announced that 5G spectrum auctions would kick start this year. This will be a singular turning point in the future of IoT, machine learning, and cloud computing in India. With India's plans on making 5G connectivity available across the country at affordable prices, the company will see a flush of intelligent devices in the market. There will also be massive transformations in the manufacturing and critical infrastructure sectors as intelligent devices are adopted widely. While these innovations are a step in the right direction in achieving India's goals to succeed on a global scale, it also expands the threat landscape. The future is bright but it will only remain so if cybersecurity is prioritized at every level in an organization.

6. What role has Tenable played in the innovation of new technologies?

Digital transformation has opened up a whole new world of cloud, DevOps, mobility, and IoT-related challenges. From containers to conference systems to critical infrastructure— everything is interconnected, forming a new modern attack surface. And just as the team pioneered IT vulnerability management, it is now at the forefront of innovation while helping organizations achieve security at the speed of the cloud with the latest solution, Tenable.cs. Innovation is in the DNA and solutions will continue to evolve and address the modern cybersecurity challenges.

7. Which industry verticals are you currently focusing on? And what is your go-to-market strategy for the same?

The company remains focused on working with organizations in the government sector, finance, healthcare, medical manufacturing, oil and gas, retail, transportation, education, water, automotive manufacturing, building management systems, and energy. Given that some of these sectors are highly regulated, Tenable established a local cloud instance for its Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, Tenable.io®, on Amazon Web Services (AWS), using the AWS Asia Pacific (Mumbai) region. Hosted in Mumbai, using the local AWS Region increases the scalability and flexibility of Tenable.io for customers in India to offer additional data integrity, availability, and security on top of the already-secure cloud. In doing so, organizations can comply with local data privacy regulations and policies without compromising security, scalability, and flexibility.