01
Cloud & Platform Security
Azure, AWS and GCP across hybrid and multi-cloud. Defender for Cloud, CNAPP tooling, Kubernetes orchestration, IaaS/PaaS/CaaS hardening.
Digital & artistic creations · Roseville, California
Bhargav
Vivekanandan
Security Architect
Painter & Guitarist
I build systems that defend cloud infrastructure, and I paint portraits on canvas. Twenty years of security architecture on one side of the studio wall; oil, acrylic and a six-string on the other. Both are the same discipline — patient attention, one layer at a time.
Half one
The signal
Chief Information Security Officer and Principal Security Architect at Tek Yantra. Cloud security across Azure, AWS and GCP. Zero Trust, identity and secrets, DevSecOps pipelines, application security, and the compliance regimes that govern healthcare, government and financial services.
Half two
The pigment
Portrait painter in acrylic, watercolour and oil. Electric guitarist drawn to progressive rock. Sculptor when time allows, cook by devotion, and a formally trained batsman who still follows every over. The work outside the work is not a footnote.
01 — Practice
Security architecture,
end to end
I have spent two decades moving from middleware and web infrastructure into security architecture, risk management and secure product engineering — building security functions from the ground up rather than inheriting them. That has meant standing up an enterprise risk assessment programme at a Fortune 500 health plan, architecting and shipping an AI-native security platform, and serving as the security point of contact for a California state agency.
The through-line is architecture that survives contact with production — designs I have also had to implement, operate and defend in an audit.
02
AI & ML Security
Security assessments for generative AI use cases, homegrown and third-party. Pre-training, fine-tuning, RAG and reinforcement learning applied to security problems.
03
Risk & Governance
Primary risk assessor to a Risk Escalation Committee of security, privacy, legal and architecture leaders. Third-party, enterprise and policy-exception risk.
04
Compliance Frameworks
NIST, HIPAA technical safeguards, SOC 2, PCI, CIS, IRS and FBI CJIS controls, and FedRAMP-aligned programmes.
05
DevSecOps & Automation
CI/CD pipeline architecture, SAST and DAST integration, secure SDLC, secrets management, policy as code, and automated continuous risk assessment.
06
Identity & API Security
Zero Trust and identity architecture, MFA, encryption and key handling, plus REST/JSON API security for service-oriented and integration platforms.
Selected work
Tek Yantra Inc. · Architect and engineering lead
Kosmic Eye
I envisioned, architected and personally led the end-to-end engineering of Kosmic Eye — a Unified Security Posture Management platform built as a generative AI-ML agentic cloud-native application protection platform. I owned both the architecture and the execution, directing an engineering team from concept through delivery, and packaged it as a cloud-native marketplace offering deployable directly inside a customer's own tenant.
Agentic engine
A full-stack, CNCF-powered agentic AI/ML engine combining classical and quantum computing approaches for autonomous, real-time posture assessment.
Mixed model strategy
Small- and large-scale LLMs alongside non-generative models — decision trees and computer vision — chosen per task rather than per trend.
Tenant-resident
Deployed within the customer's own infrastructure, so telemetry and findings never leave their control boundary.
Unified surface
Detection, correlation and compliance evidence brought into one posture view instead of a queue of disconnected alerts.
02 — Career
Twenty years,
one direction
From keeping web infrastructure alive at 3 a.m. to deciding what an enterprise is allowed to risk.
2024 — PresentRoseville, CA
Chief Information Security Officer
Tek Yantra Inc.
- Set enterprise security strategy and lead security product vision and roadmap.
- Own organisation-wide risk management and facilitate risk governance.
- Architected and led delivery of Kosmic Eye, the company's agentic AI CNAPP.
- Dual CISO and security architect for the managed security engagement with the California Department of Child Support Services — DevSecOps and CI/CD pipelines, SFTP migration, and single point of contact to their Information Security Organization.
2022 — 2024Oakland, CA
Principal, Information Security & Risk Management
Blue Shield of California
- Primary security risk assessor to the Risk Escalation Committee.
- Built and ran AI security assessments, including generative AI use cases — SME for the practice.
- Annual IT HIPAA security and technical safeguards assessments across on-premises, hybrid and public cloud assets.
- Co-led cloud security compliance planning for hybrid Azure, GCP and on-premises estate.
- Designed the multi-cloud automated continuous risk assessment strategy and target-state architecture.
2015 — 2022El Dorado Hills, CA
Security Lead, Cloud & Middleware Engineer
Blue Shield of California
- Led the security partnership with IT Security to raise cloud engineering's security capability.
- Solution architecture and DevOps for the Application Integration Platform, from architecture through implementation and governance.
- Established end-to-end application, server and database monitoring, and set middleware technology standards for the IT organisation.
VolunteerCISA
Security Research Leader
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
- Contributing to an industry standard for implementing SBOM in the cloud — brand-agnostic, spanning application tier to bare metal.
- Co-authoring a publication on SBOM cloud stack transparency, including the shared responsibility matrix across IaaS, PaaS and SaaS.
2009 — 2015Moline, IL · Chennai
Delivery Project Executive
IBM
- Technical leader at John Deere, running a middleware team supporting hundreds of Deere sites across load balancers, Linux and Windows estates and WebSphere.
- Turned around chronic service delivery problems by reshaping people, process and technology against the client's actual business requirements.
- Transition leader for CNA Insurance; subject matter expert establishing a middleware centre of excellence.
- IBM Manager's Choice Award, 2014 — for putting the client first.
2007 — 2009Chennai · Winnipeg · London
Associate IT Operations Manager
Cognizant Technology Solutions
- Technical and project leadership for insurance and banking clients in North America and the UK — Lloyds TSB, Great-West Life, MetLife.
- Led a six-engineer team through a WebSphere Application and Portal Server migration, designing the automated migration strategy.
- Technical Wizard award, 2007; Service Innovation of the Quarter, 2008.
03 — Credentials
Certified,
and still studying
A master's in Information Systems Management with a specialisation in organisational leadership, a bachelor's in chemical engineering, and the security certifications that matter for cloud and automation work.
CISSP
Certified Information Systems Security ProfessionalISC2 · verify on Credly
CCSP
Certified Cloud Security ProfessionalISC2 · verify on Credly
GCSA
GIAC Cloud Security AutomationGIAC · verify on Credly
MIS
M.S. Information Systems ManagementUniv. of Arizona Global Campus · 2021
B.Tech
Chemical EngineeringUniversity of Madras · 2002
Lead
Leadership EssentialsMcKinsey · verify on Credly
Red Hat OpenShift Administration
TOGAF 9.1
Georgia Tech — Software Development
Georgia Tech — Computer Networks
IBM WebSphere Advanced Admin
Splunk
Docker
AWS Fundamentals
04 — Studio
Portraits,
layer by layer
I paint in acrylic, watercolour and oil, and portraiture is where I keep returning. A likeness is unforgiving work — there is no way to fake the distance between two eyes, and no shortcut through the twenty thin passes it takes before skin stops looking like paint.
It is the same instinct that makes me a decent architect. Build the structure first, then earn the detail.
05 — Craft
The rest of
the practice
Painting is not the only thing that happens after hours. These are not hobbies collected for a résumé — they are the things I am actually doing when I am not architecting something.
Music
Six strings, odd time signatures
I play electric guitar, and progressive rock is where I live — the long-form pieces where a riff earns its place over eight minutes instead of thirty seconds. Heavy metal and classic rock are the rest of the record shelf.
Progressive music is structural music. You cannot improvise your way through a piece in 7/8; you have to understand the architecture before you can play loosely inside it.
Kitchen
Cooking, seriously
I cook across cuisines — South Indian first, because that is the grammar I learned, but genuinely across the map, and I grill with the same attention. Sculpture gets picked up whenever the time appears.
And cricket: a batsman with years of formal training, still following every series. Batting taught me something security work keeps confirming — you do not have to score off every ball, you have to not get out.
06 — In public
Speaking
and teaching
I spoke on a panel at the AI Cybersecurity Forum on autonomous AI cybersecurity threats, alongside AI safety and security leaders from Google and elsewhere. I also record what I learn — including how I prepared for the certifications that gate this field, because the guidance available when I sat them was thin.
07 — Family
The people
it is all for
Everything above happens around a family. My wife and our two boys, my parents, and the temple towns of Tamil Nadu we keep going back to — the granite ones that have been standing for a thousand years and were built by people who also cared about structure and detail.
Twenty years of work, one reason for it.
