Anindya Misra
Product
I am seeking for the bridge which leans from the visible to the invisible through reality.
Software engineering happened to me by fate. Born in the 80s in India, I followed the engineering route and my cousins to America to seek a better life, like most in my generation. As an immigrant student, '09 was a bad time to graduate and launch a career in the post-recession world. After being an intern for more than a year, I had finally started a permanent position at RSA, The security division of EMC as a software engineer in the SIEM team. My job was to collect, parse and model log data from all kinds of servers, routers, gateways, firewalls, etc. This was by no means a dream job compared to Google and Microsoft at that time, but I was grateful for the opportunity. Despite an unreasonable number of roommates, sub-par pay, and a second-hand car that could give in any minute, I felt that things were finally looking up. Then, in a near Forrest Gumpish incident on a cold fateful morning, I found myself caught in the middle of a landmark story that changed my life. Here it goes !!I swerved my mean machine- '98 Nissan Altima through a Dunkin to get my usual morning hit of double sugar double cream with coffee and a Boston cream donut; I knew I was already late for yet another day at work. Sporting my freebie backpack, I rolled into the proud corner that I shared with three other techies. "Anindya, can I see you in my office" - my Manager called out. As I walked into his office, my usual cheerful boss had a grim look on his face. As he looked towards his window - he said, "There is a project I want you to work on. Please keep it to yourself, but there is an ongoing investigation of a possible data breach in our servers. You will work closely with the Security Operations Center team to assist in forensics." He then walked me across the bridge to the adjacent building where the Security Operations Center was housed. What I saw there was straight from a Hollywood movie - Huge television screens and scores of "analysts" sifting through data as if in a NASA control room. Little did I know that the "boring" log analysis product I worked on was the foundation of this bustling operation. I was introduced to the analysts who looked exhausted as if they had not slept for days. I got a seat at the war room and started working with them.
The analysts used my product day in and out, and as customers had a lot of questions around the inner workings and features. Sitting with them and seeing them use the product, I felt proud of my work, and suddenly the "Why" of my 8-10 hours daily had a higher purpose. I also realized that the way we designed the product was very different from the way analysts used it; most of our assumptions were not correct. I worked closely with the analysts and learned a lot from them. Then, RSA publicly disclosed the breach even though some thought it was suicidal for a security vendor to be hacked. As Art(RSA President)put it, "Trust was the bedrock of our business," and we had to be very transparent with our customers. Very soon, Google and others also disclosed their breaches in what seemed to be a series of sophisticated nation-state attacks. In fact, the demand for our product rose significantly, and the learnings from the breach were productized and sold to many of our customers, and I had a front seat to all this action.
Today data breaches are commonplace, and the SIEM market has ballooned into a multi-billion dollar Security Analytics industry. I was lucky to be a small part of that story. But, I am happy I crossed the bridge to the other side where my customers were on that fateful day. It changed my life!