Interview with Ajit Gaddam, Chief Architect, VISA, - Speaker at Santa Clara Big Data Bootcamp Nov 2016 Posted on : Nov 08 - 2016

We feature speakers at Big Data Bootcamp Santa Clara Nov 11 - 13 to catch up and find out what he or she is working on now and what's coming next. This week we're talking to Ajit Gaddam, Chief Architect, VISA.

Interview with Ajit Gaddam

Tell us about yourself and your background.
I am the the Chief Architect for Information Security at VISA Inc. Over the last decade, I had the privilege and opportunity to lead the Information Security and security architecture programs for various financial, insurance and tech companies. I also founded two startups with successful exits and am an active participant in various open source and security standards bodies. I contribute quite heavily in the innovation space (over 50 patents), international speaker (BlackHat, Strata Hadoop, Global Big Data Conference, COSO, OpenGroup, etc.), teacher (SANS, community colleges), and a security researcher (book author, over 180 citations on Google Scholar).

What have you been working on recently?

The Information Technology world is both converging (on data) while getting distributed (on platforms and infrastructure) at the same time. I am increasingly looking at harnessing Machine Learning capabilities and leveraging automation techniques to address the security challenges coming up with the above. Both of the above converge nicely with Kafka which is the topic of my presentation.

Tell me about the right tool you used recently to solve customer problem?
Sticking to the presentation topic, Kafka allowed me to help deploy a real-time analytics platform and Hadoop and deploying new ML models with Spark. 

What are some of the best takeaways that the attendees can have from your "Securing An Apache Kafka Cluster" talk?

1. Identity and Access Management established for a Kafka cluster.

2. Data Protection of a Kafka cluster protected both at rest and in transit.

3. Reference architecture for security of a data lake leveraging Kafka.

What are the top 5 Big Data Use cases?

1. Ensuring the security of a Data Lake while maintaining privacy when aggregating datasets

2. Adhering various compliance and regulatory requirements

3. Performing advanced data analytics

4. Training and closing on skill/tech gaps

5. Defining and implementing good usecases, while utilizing the right tool/platform

What trends you see in upcoming 6 months?

For a change, the buzz words are actually turning into reality. Notions of utilizing large datasets, leveraging cheap computing power, leveraging excellent open source platforms, and solving your usecases has turned into a reality. I see more growth in two areas - advancement of automation techniques and advances in ensuring data privacy.

Any closing remarks?

Really looking forward to the conference. This is truly a very good experience for the participants, allowing them to move beyond blog post or MOOC based learning and get hands-on experience with the Big Data technologies.