Meera Rao – Senior Director Product Management at Synopsys
What do you hope attendees will gain at your webinar?
- How to move from a reactive, assurance-based model toward a proactive model focused on earlier risk mitigation and prevention.
- Strike a balance between detection (“find”), mitigation (“fix”), and prevention (“prevent”)
of software-induced risk. - Use automation to ensure built-in checks.
- Include key checkpoints/gates at various phases in the pipeline.
What discussions do you look forward to having with the attendees?
Understanding their challenges and hope to guide them in the right direction to build secure software.
What do you enjoy most about your role?
Working with organizations to build security in, and on a day to day basis come up with new solutions to solve their problems.
How did you get into the industry?
I think it’s an interesting story. So I was actually working as a continuous integration practitioner with an earlier company. This was the time when the economy was going down. And then one fine day, I came to know that I had no job starting Monday. I interviewed at Cigital (now part of Synopsys) on Saturday. They asked me to join on a Monday—this is in 2008—after an interview. So by the end of the day, I had a job and an offer letter at Cigital. I didn’t know anything about software security. I learned everything from scratch and have never looked back. It’s now 12 years and I enjoy every day and never feel like I am working, it is my passion now.
Where is your favourite place in the world and why?
My home. I have been traveling a lot for the past decade. Staying at home, spending time with my family, cooking, sewing, reading and listening to podcast is what I love when I am home.
About Meera
Meera partners with security teams and experts from Fortune 500 companies, and multi-national corporations around the globe leading architecture risk analyses, threat modelling engagements, secure design reviews, secure code reviews, and helping organizations start and mature their continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous deployment (CD), and DevOps engineering activities. She advises organizations in defining, implementing, maturing, scaling and measuring DevSecOps.
She is very passionate about getting more women working in the technology industry. Ms. Meera participates, presents and speaks at several conferences, spreading her knowledge of security and the importance of women in the technology workforce. Meera was awarded the SecDevOps Trailblazer award from SecuritySerious in London in 2018. Meera was a finalist in the Computing Women in IT Excellence Awards 2019 for Role Model of the Year.
As a woman in cybersecurity, she is a strong believer that confidence is key. The true key to her success has been making sure her opinions and ideas are heard; and being confident in her vision for projects. In a role predominantly occupied by men, Meera has defied the stereotype of what an engineer looks like. Her expertise and poise are key to her success in working with organizations by implementing cutting-edge tools and processes.
She is an inspiring role model not only for women working in cybersecurity, but also to all professionals who look to excel in the security industry. Her quiet, but continuous dedication and contributions to the field of cybersecurity bring positive changes to some of the world’s largest organizations.
Join Meera Rao оn a webinar entitled Building Security in DevOps with Intelligent Orchestration by Synopsys on 18th of December at 2PM London / 3PM CET.