As enterprises navigate increasingly complex threat landscapes, the shift from traditional perimeter defenses to platform-first Zero Trust architectures has become critical. Vaibhav Patkar, Chief Information Security Officer at Orient Technologies Limited, brings strategic insight into this transformation. In this conversation, Patkar explores how organizations can achieve measurable security outcomes while maintaining operational efficiency. From AI-driven threat intelligence to embedding resilience into digital transformation, he offers practical guidance for CISOs balancing innovation with risk management. His platform-centric approach highlights the importance of consolidation, automation, and proactive defense in today’s multi-cloud environments.
CISO
Orient Technologies
CISO Forum: How can enterprises transition from perimeter security to a platform-first Zero Trust approach while ensuring measurable ROI?
Vaibhav Patkar: Enterprises can transition effectively by centralizing identity, access, and policy orchestration within a unified security platform. A phased Zero Trust rollout, starting with critical assets and high-risk user groups, creates early wins and measurable ROI. Reducing tool sprawl, improving audit readiness, and lowering breach exposure further strengthen the business case while enabling long-term scalability.
CISO Forum: What best practices enable continuous verification of identity, device, and data without disrupting productivity?
Vaibhav Patkar: Risk-adaptive authentication, automated device posture assessments, and unified identity governance enable seamless continuous verification. By determining user and device risk in real time, security teams can apply stronger controls only when needed. This minimizes friction, ensures consistent policy application, and maintains high productivity across distributed and hybrid workforces.
CISO Forum: How can platform security unify multiple tools and policies while reducing operational complexity for CISOs?
Vaibhav Patkar: A platform-first architecture consolidates identity, endpoint, network, and data controls into a single policy engine. This significantly reduces operational overhead, improves visibility across environments, and simplifies compliance reporting. For CISOs, this unification accelerates decision-making, lowers the total cost of ownership, and enables a more proactive, risk-aligned security posture.
CISO Forum: How can AI-driven analytics strengthen threat detection, remediation, and predictive defense in multi-cloud environments?
Vaibhav Patkar: AI strengthens defense by correlating signals from identity, cloud workloads, endpoints, and network telemetry. This improves detection accuracy, reduces false positives, and enables autonomous or semi-autonomous remediation. Predictive analytics identify emerging attack patterns early, reducing mean time to respond and enhancing resilience across multi-cloud ecosystems.
CISO Forum: What strategies help organizations embed cyber resilience into digital transformation projects from day one?
Vaibhav Patkar: Embedding resilience starts with involving security at the architectural design stage. Secure-by-design principles, continuous risk assessments, automated policy enforcement, and regular resilience testing ensure that transformation initiatives scale securely. This proactive approach helps organizations maintain compliance, safeguard data, and sustain operations even amid evolving threats.
