Balagopal Kaimal
Verified Expert in Engineering
Cybersecurity Architect and Developer
Kaimal is a senior cybersecurity architect with a master's degree in IT. He is a strategy and technology enthusiast with substantial experience in cybersecurity advisory and transformation, cloud and digital security architecture, and risk and compliance. Kaimal is passionate about architecting, designing, planning, and implementing on-premise and cloud cybersecurity solutions that support digital transformation.
Portfolio
Experience
Availability
Preferred Environment
CISO, Cloud Security, Security Architecture, Risk, Compliance, Startups
The most amazing...
...thing I've architected is Command Post, a unified cybersecurity and compliance platform delivering end-to-end detection, protection, and compliance for SMEs.
Work Experience
Lead Security Architect
Freelance Clients
- Established a security architecture practice ground-up for a large retail and trading group of companies, aligning with enterprise architecture and defining ways of working and governance structure.
- Achieved over 90% security architecture and design review for all new projects and change requests, significantly minimizing the business risks for a large retail and trading group of companies.
- Attained 100% business case approval at the C-level digital committee for FY 2021-22 and FY 2022-23 for a large retail and trading group of companies.
- Led a high-impact data loss prevention (DLP) project for a large retail and trading group of companies, imparting data discovery, classification, labeling, a DLP policy, alerting, and SIEM integration, affecting all its companies and departments.
- Architected, designed, and delivered cloud application security using Microsoft Defender for Cloud Apps. The solution helped significantly reduce the organization's use of Shadow IT resources, thereby reducing data exfiltration vectors.
- Conducted an identity and access management (IAM) as-is assessment to identify and quantify an organization's maturity, then prepared the target IAM architecture and roadmap and developed a phase-wise business case for C-level approval.
- Handled digital security assessment and transformation, data governance, enterprise and security architecture alignment, target state definition, report writing, and presentation to the CXO for a national airline in East Africa.
- Built security architecture and patterns for a large omnichannel web front—supporting multiple retail brands and third-party SaaS ecosystems—improving time to market using microservices, API-first, cloud-native, and headless architecture principles.
Security Architect
Emirates Group
- Established a security operations center (SOC) ground up, covering people, processes, and technology.
- Drove the SOC project from requirements to delivery, including market research, requests for information and proposal documentation, sizing, solution architecture and design, implementation, and operationalization.
- Led the security architecture—not limited to security control design, validation, threat modeling, risk assessment, and attack simulation—for numerous high-revenue and critical projects, such as the biometrics path at Dubai Airport Terminal 3.
- Delivered key security solutions, such as multi-cloud and data center network micro-segmentation, including legacy mainframes.
- Provided key security solutions, such as cloud and on-premise web app firewalls, privileged access management, and certificate and key management, including hardware security modules.
- Received the Najm Award for delivering security projects that helped the organization achieve external compliance requirements.
Experience
Unified Detection, Protection, and Compliance Platform
I architected the platform, which delivers complete visibility to an organization with real-time threat monitoring, managed detection response, and integrated risk-based vulnerability management. This is achieved through integrated technical controls and processes leveraging an in-build risk function, data loss prevention, and awareness capability.
Education
Master's Degree in Information Technology
Bharathidasan University - Tiruchirappalli, Tamil Nadu, India
Certifications
Certified Information Security Manager® (CISM)
ISACA
Microsoft Certified: Cybersecurity Architect Expert
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified: Azure Security Engineer Associate
Microsoft
CompTIA Advanced Security Practitioner (CASP+) Certification
CompTIA
Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge v.4
Cloud Security Alliance
TOGAF® 9 Certification
The Open Group
Skills
Industry Expertise
Cybersecurity
Other
Security Architecture, ISO 27001, NIST, GDPR, CIS Benchmarks, Critical Security Controls (CIS Controls), Program Management, Security Design, Enterprise Architecture, Information Security, Information Security Management Systems (ISMS), Security, IT Project Management, CISO, Data Loss Prevention (DLP), Security Operations Centers (SOC), Cloud Security, Identity & Access Management (IAM), SIEM, PCI DSS, Zero Trust, International Data Privacy Regulations, Data Privacy, System Hardening, SecOps, Threat Modeling, Application Security, Azure Well-Architected Framework, Risk Management, Risk & Compliance, Identity, Office 365, Teams, Product Management, Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Risk, Compliance, Software Engineering, Computer Networking, Shell Scripting, Open Source, Information Risk Compliance, IT Governance, IT Security, IT Security Program Manager, GRC, Resilient Enterprise Solutions, Secure Enterprise Architecture, Technical Leadership, CCM V.3.0.1, Cloud Architecture, Audit Management, Incident Response, Infrastructure Security, Virtualization, Containers, TOGAF ADM, Networking, Secure Compute, Secure Storage, Cloud Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Data Encryption, Governance
Tools
OSSIM, Suricata, AWS IAM, Azure Information Protection (AIP), Sentinel
Paradigms
DevSecOps, Web Architecture
Platforms
Azure, Linux, Azure IaaS
Languages
Python, YAML
Frameworks
Windows PowerShell, TOGAF
Storage
Databases, JSON, Database Security
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