CyberWire Daily - Payal Chakravarty: Overcoming bias in the workplace. [Security and Risk] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: October 9, 2022

Payal Chakravarty, Head of Product for Security and Risk from Coalition, sits down to share her story of working at several different organizations, including interning for IBM and Microsoft. After obtaining her master's degree, she worked with IBM a bit more closely and fell in love with one of the projects she was working on. Payal had a very interesting career path going from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud now, cloud to containers. She says that there is still some bias she has dealt with as a woman in her field, she says, "I think the way you handle it is you negotiate or you kind of calmly handle the situation, there's no ego involved." Payal shares that in working in this field you need to be in love with it, giving the advice that don't just choose a job because of the money or because it's cool, but because you feel connected to it as a profession. We thank Payal for sharing her story. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. Hi, my name is Payal Chakravarti and I am the head of product for security and risk at coalition. Growing up, I always thought I would either be a doctor. That's a profession I really respected. Or I would be an architect who would be building buildings. Combine math and art together.

Because my interest was really in math, art, and biology. Those were my three favorite subjects. my interest was really in math, art, and biology. Those were my three favorite subjects. When I was in high school, I got intrigued with the evolution of computers. This is back in the late 90s when it was an evolving area. Internet was just coming alive. So I got very intrigued by that. And I was like, okay, this seems like a fun place to tinker and understand and be hands-on and build things. And that's how I got into computer science and chose, it's like I was interested in electronics. And hence I chose an engineering career path. I grew up in India and I did my undergrad in India and out of graduation there were

lots of opportunities for joining software companies at that point in time so there were lots of multinationals you know interviewing us so decided to foray into software and joined a company called IBM in India for a year before I decided to pursue my master's and come to the United States and study computer science here. So I finished up master's and I actually joined IBM at the Research Triangle Park location. They have a huge campus there. I think we had about 10,000 employees there. So I did an internship at IBM and Microsoft during my master's and I decided to pick up IBM as I was getting into, I was thrown into this project where we had to get, we had to work with customers,

understand their needs for, they were in the data center, they were basically data center managers and they had a bunch of siloed tools at that point in time. And what I had to do was kind of study their use cases and stitch together massive amounts of data

from different siloed tools and present those use cases in sort of dashboards and analytics. So my first experience was building really scalable, massively performing data marks and dashboards and reports and analysis, encompassing, you know, several use cases and like answering questions like, hey, where should I move my workloads? You know, what kind of capacity does my data center have? This is when the world was going through the physical to virtualization transition.

Cloud was still not a thing at the data center, but did many different things at IBM. But one of the things, one of the projects that I really loved was actually transitioning to the cloud. So I had to take an entire portfolio of software and they were on-prem software and actually transitioning to the cloud. So I had to take an entire portfolio of software and they were on-prem software and move them to the cloud. So this is where I was exposed, you know, hands-on,

figuring out what would it take to take a monolith, make it a service-based product, post it on the cloud, create a SaaS experience where users could do full self-service, you know, try by, you know, try-buy. You know, IBM hadn't done that before, literally. And then figure out everything from SLAs to security to what it means to run on the cloud. So that was amazing because I learned so many things

and that made me very intrigued about building products for the cloud. Right after that, I joined a little tiny startup called Sysdig. We were 30 people and we were figuring out how to do container monitoring because now we were transitioning. So I went from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud, now cloud to containers and microservices. And these workloads were extremely dynamic and transient So I went from physical to virtual, virtual to cloud, now cloud to containers and microservices. And these workloads were extremely dynamic and transient and at massive scale with massive amount of connections that they're creating. And we had to figure out how to monitor them with all those parameters.

So Sysdig had come up with this exciting new technology, you know, leveraging system calls and EPPF to basically do all of these detections. And that's how, so that was my foray into sort of security. And how I landed up in coalition is I'd been building software for enterprises for the longest time. And enterprises have the power, they have teams and, you know, investment in software And they have sort of processes, everything to keep their environment secure. So I loved Polition's mission there. Hey, like, hey, you know, as I got your back, I will be there to take care

of your financial liability if you get hacked or you have an incident. But at the same time, I will also provide you incident response. I will provide you help if you do have an incident to mitigate, to recover from it, to negotiate if needed. That's what brought me to where I am today.

So two or three things that I do absolutely value. Number one is, of course, keeping in product management, keeping the user in mind, keeping the customer in mind. What pain point are we trying to solve? Is it an important pain point to solve? Asking that question many times to make sure that we are actually solving for the most important things and the most important pain points for our customers. Not jumping to solutions, but understanding the background before we make decisions about what we build. The second thing I would say from a leadership perspective is always trying to create clarity from ambiguity. So making sure that aligning people on that clarity of

vision, clarity of where we want to head, and then taking that vision and the clarity that you created and the alignment that you created into an execution machine. And how do you constantly execute, iterate, fail, come back, but ensuring that you have clarity and alignment at all points in time. There does exist biases in this industry. So there have been times when that has been challenged, right? Like I have been not stating any specific job, but I've been on calls where, let's say, a customer joins and wants to know who's the technical person in the room. And it's often frustrating to say,

yeah, which part of technology do you want to talk about? Let's talk about it and we can work through it. So I think that's, overcoming bias is always something that we as women leaders have to, I feel, strongly look out for and constantly prove ourselves, no matter where you are, no matter what you're doing. But I think the way you handle it is you negotiate, you listen, you understand, you ask questions and you build confidence and trust.

And then they, you know, and that's how you build your credibility and your reputation overall. There's no easy way around it. Follow something that you feel connected with. Don't just do it for joining a cool brand or getting a better salary. Don't do it for those reasons. Follow something where you connect. There's something that really connects you and you feel deeply driven to solve that problem. Focus on the problem. I think once you follow that connection and you figure out a problem that you feel passionate about to solve, you will do whatever it needs to make it successful

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