Cyber threats have been on the rise globally. Small businesses especially have been susceptible to these threats as they make even more deliberate attempts to secure their businesses. The lack of coordinated efforts and strategies to mitigate this problem has placed many businesses on the verge of collapse. Kaushal Saraf believes innovation and mindset shifts are vital to overcoming cybersecurity challenges.
Kaushal Saraf is a lead engineer at Atomus. Atomus provides small and midsize business sectors with industry-standard cybersecurity and ensures no one is left to build in isolation on their compliance journey. He discovered his passion for technology at a very young age. As a seventh grader, he designed a desktop application for a pharmacy that simplified and expedited the store’s billing process leading to better inventory management along with putting patients` interest foremost. Years later, while he was an undergraduate, he teamed up with his friends, and together they built an app called EventBuzz to solve a problem they faced themselves. The app registered over 5K students across 28 colleges in the nation.
Before he delved fully into professional engineering as a career at Goldman Sachs, he and his team reconstructed an outdated registration and payment system. The web platform handled payment and registration for over 15K participants for three days. Previously, similar registration was done manually, with the entire process riddled with errors. Saraf and his team wanted a change in the mode of operation; they opted for innovation, and to make a difference, they ensured the site could analyze and filter critical data.
Saraf holds a master’s degree in computer science; he believes skills and mindset to be the most critical tools for solving problems. Therefore, to perfect his skills, Saraf engaged in projects, hackathons, internships, and projects deployed in the real world from scales of a business doing $500K to firms like Goldman Sachs and WeWork.
An industry expert, Saraf has achieved significant heights in his engineering career. He won a national competition out of 225 startups, got selected as one of the Eight engineers of 2020 at the prestigious Viterbi School of Engineering, was featured in 20 in their 20s LA Business Journal, and got awarded a contract as a Key Technical Personnel by the United States Air Force worth $750K.
Every occupation has its challenges, and engineering is not an exception. Saraf highlights one of the major technical challenges he encountered alongside his teammates when they worked on a project at Atomus. The team encountered a technical limitation with an existing infrastructure technology. They worked round the clock to circumvent this limitation; however, despite all efforts, it proved abortive given its ancient nature.
To overcome this hurdle, Saraf and the team began re-engineering the existing infrastructure and re-purposing basic principles to remove this limitation and bring their platform into reality.
As a lead engineer, Saraf emphasizes giving to constant learning to achieve tremendous success and experience unhindered progress in the industry. He further stresses the importance of continuous learning and staying ahead of the curve to continue pushing innovation boundaries. As demonstrated by Saraf, mindset is a powerful weapon; it dictates the extent of resilience towards proffering a solution to a problem.
Saraf, having had first-hand experience with running a business; to help entrepreneurs thrive in their businesses, Saraf envisions building a platform that seamlessly allows businesses to run security programs effectively and affordably. “I aspire to engineer products and platforms to create impact and disallow technology from being a limitation to solving real-world problems, “ asserts Saraf.
