First Year of CSA Bangalore Chapter

I never dreamt that I could lead an organization, no matter how small it is.

Our team gave this mysterious success to me, as we survived through the toughest part of a non-profit organization journey, that is the first year of operations. Believe me or not, it is as exciting and as tough as the first year of married life ??. ?

Building an organization from the scratch is a great learning for all of us, as none of us know any prior knowledge in this area. In this post, I like to share the power of few likeminded people that make this happen.

Firstly, I should thank Ekta Mishra for being the strong supporter to begin the journey of this chapter, with our first member Manjesh Pai. We discussed and debated several pros and cons of registering a chapter. We deliberated the idea of formation of NGO with different leaders and met with like minded people in industry forums. Sidhu Sridhara, our mentor, was one among those who gave us some guiding principles that act as foundational guidelines for our chapter.

The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. - Lao Tzu

My friends and close confidants Pooja Agrawalla, Sujatha Yekasiri, Jagriti Pandey, Akash Gupta, and Vandana Verma joined the journey with a common interest to give back to the society, share their wealth of knowledge, and invest in building the cloud security community.

Great things in business are never done by one person. They're done by a team of people. -Steve Jobs

Defining Vision, mission statements for our organization was not an easy task, as those form the founding principles of the organization. After several brain storming sessions, and advisor inputs, we found a strong enough purpose that can connect us all to contribute to this community activity.

While writing the bylaws to run a society is hard enough, we faced more challenges in registering the society during the period of COVID19. After several struggles and iterations, on 22nd September 2020, CSA Bangalore Chapter was registered as a non-profit organization.?Recently Madhu and Sowmya joined support the core group.

Our vision is to build “a platform to incubate ideas through research to build and sustain secure cloud environment”

Our mission is ?“Creating and sharing best practices in building security embedded cloud environment by promoting collaboration between industry and academia.”

Our young developer and an undergraduate student, Vihar Devalla, built our website with the able mentorship of Abhinay Adhiraju. ?More undergraduate students joined us to volunteer in web page development, design work and research : Chinmay and Trivikram are the latest.

Our story is not complete without listing the chapter's achievements. We affiliated with WiCYS India, and Amritha University to conduct set of interactive webinar series for professionals and students to listen to, and learn by practicing the foundations of cloud security.

We signed as CCSK authorized training partner with CSA. We launched CCSK training sessions in association with CSA APC. We continue to partner our CSA annual summits. Next CSA India Cloud Security Summit will be held on 1st Oct 2021.

Research being the core of our chapter, we are working with CSA on a global research about multi-cloud in association with Micro Focus. ?We will share the details soon, as that journey just began.

In conclusion, I like to quote, “Sometimes it's the journey that teaches you a lot about your destination.” — Drake?

We finished one tough journey, and moving on to yet other adventure. Looking forward for more people to walk with us on this exciting path.?

Write to us [email protected] to know more.