Dharshan Venugopal
Cloud Infrastructure & Security Architect@Cisco | Platform Security| DevSecOps | Digital Transformation | Ex-Thoughtworks, Nissan
Bangalore Urban
11+ years of work experience
Jan 20233 yrs 10 mosPresent
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
i) Leadership in Global Azure Landing Zone Deployment: Led a cross-functional team of 8 members across India, the US, and Europe to design, implement, and manage a comprehensive Azure landing zone. This included establishing guardrails and governance policies, enforcing robust tagging and networking best practices, implementing security auditing with Azure Defender, optimising costs, and conducting training sessions to ensure seamless adoption and operational excellence across the organisation.
ii) Architected and Deployed Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: Spearheaded the establishment of a hybrid cloud environment, enabling seamless network connectivity between AWS and Azure. Key implementations included transit gateways, site-to-site VPNs, customer gateways, virtual WANs, and virtual private gateways.
iii) Security Enhancements for containers: Developed and advocated for the adoption of security-hardened ARM64 and AMD64 base images, significantly improving the security posture during application development.
iv) Security Auditing Implementation: Deployed and configured advanced security auditing tools such as Falco and kube-bench on Kubernetes clusters. Integrated these findings into AWS Security Hub for comprehensive visualisation and monitoring.
v) Cloud and Kubernetes Security Audits: Conducted thorough security audits of cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters, identifying and mitigating potential vulnerabilities.
Nov 20211 yr 3 mosJan 2023
Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India
i) Cloud COE Leadership: As a core member of the Cloud Center of Excellence (COE) team, designed, validated, and developed secure, highly available, and scalable big data processing infrastructures on AWS and Azure.
ii) Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Developed and deployed cloud resources using Terraform IaC templates. Ensured template integrity and security by validating them with tools like Checkov, both locally with pre-commit hooks and within CI/CD pipelines.
iii) Continuous Cloud Security Auditing: Implemented continuous security audits on cloud platforms using tools such as ScoutSuite and Prowler. Utilised Microsoft Defender as a Cloud Security Posture Management (CSPM) tool.
iv) Kubernetes Orchestration: Orchestrated the creation of Kubernetes clusters on Azure (AKS) using Terraform. Automated deployment processes to Kubernetes clusters using HELM.
v) DevSecOps Automation: Engineered fully automated DevSecOps pipelines with Azure DevOps to deploy microservices on the cloud. Integrated security best practices including secret scanning (Trufflehog), SAST (SpotBugs/SonarQube), OSS licence validation (LicenseFinder), software composition analysis (OWASP Dependency-Check), container scanning (Grype), container audit (Dockle), Kubernetes configuration scanning (KubeSec), and DAST for APIs (OWASP-ZAP).
vi) Security Advocacy: Served as a security champion, ensuring adherence to security best practices throughout the software development lifecycle. Led frequent threat modelling exercises using the STRIDE model, and proactively addressed identified vulnerabilities.
vii) Azure Services Engineering: Engineered and optimised over 10 Azure services for broad organisational adoption.
Apr 20218 mosNov 2021
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India
Sep 20182 yrs 7 mosMar 2021
Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala, India
i) Cloud Infrastructure Design: Planned, designed, validated, and developed highly available and scalable application infrastructures hosted on AWS. Utilised AWS CloudFormation to develop Infrastructure as Code (IaC) templates.
ii) AWS Service Engineering: Engineered over 15 AWS services for widespread organisational use, enhancing cloud efficiency and performance.
iii) Python-Based Automation: Developed Python-based web applications and scripts to automate and secure daily operational tasks related to infrastructure and application management. A key project included a Python Flask web server that converted native Swagger files to AWS API Gateway-specific Swagger files, adhering to organisational standards.
iv) Custom Authentication and Authorization Solution: Architected a reusable authentication and authorization solution using AWS CloudFront, Lambda, and Cognito. This innovation significantly reduced application development time and cost for the organisation.
v) Service Mesh Implementation: Implemented AWS App Mesh architecture to manage microservice communication, ensuring seamless and secure inter-service interactions.
vi) Training and Mentorship: Conducted training sessions for both freshers and experienced developers on DevOps tools and AWS services, fostering a culture of continuous learning and skill development.
Aug 20162 yrs 1 moAug 2018
Chennai Area, India
i) Developed a WiFi power socket using ESP8266 integrated with AWS IoT platform to automatically turn on and off based on events triggered by companies propieriotory digital signage solution. This helped the company to increase the sales by almost 50% since such a solution was not prevalent in the market at that time.
ii) Developed a fully automatic software tool for reading scanned copies of KYC documents like Aadhar, Pan, Voter ID and then verifying it with the data filled in the application form by the customer. In this project, my role was to process the image and collect,crucial data points from them and cross verify it with the details in the DB.
Aug 20151 yr 5 mosDec 2016
India
Dharshan’s AI Stack
Education
B.tech, Electronics and Communication Engineering
Government Engineering College, Sreekrishnapuram
20124 yrs2016
Senior Secondary, Science
Chinmaya Vidyalaya Pallavur
20057 yrs2012
Join Dharshan and 10k+ other professionals on
Tal is the app where bosses meet engineers & builders directly, without middlemen
Download Tal Boss