Manish Pandey, CISO of Airtel Payments Bank, has worked in several industries, including e-commerce, academics and fast-moving consumer goods ITeS, and banking. So he has seen first-hand the challenges of the cybersecurity skills gap in multiple contexts.
Pandey started his professional journey in cybersecurity with the Indian Computer Emergency Response Team, the government’s nodal agency to deal with cybersecurity threats. From there, he moved to several organisations with the intent of learning various domains within cybersecurity and information security. His goal was to eventually join the financial sector as cybersecurity plays a critical role in it — not only are the implications of a breach are profound in the financial sector, but he found the cybersecurity landscape challenging in that sector and thus an industry he could learn much in.