Apptega Chief Product Officer Rahul Bakshi is Hellbent on Building Frictionless Software

Rahul Bakshi has seen this from the other side. Having run product for category-leading managed detection and response (MDR) companies and enterprise cybersecurity companies, Apptega's new chief product officer is deeply versed in the business concerns and product needs that are unique to managed security providers.

“We have two sets of customers: the end customer that consumes the software and the service provider that's out there building offerings and driving value,” Bakshi says in an interview. “Our challenge is to empower them both with scale and efficiencies that, quite frankly, most software makers don’t consider.”  
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Bakshi’s track record in SaaS cybersecurity includes highly successful leadership roles guiding product strategy and development for among the most well-regarded providers in the space. He most recently served as chief product officer at eSentire, a global leader in MDR with more than 2,000 customers and, before that, as SVP of products at Securonix — a leader in SIEM, UEBA, security analytics and detection for the Global 2000.  

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“Coming from the service provider side, one of the things that I’ve experienced a lot in my career is that software is not designed for service providers. It doesn’t contemplate true multi- tenancy, it doesn’t contemplate write-once-deploy-many, it doesn’t contemplate how the service provider really interacts with the software,” he says.

“That provider-side disposition is in our DNA, and we will continue to amplify it.”  

Whereas, on the in-house side, security and compliance tools attempt to speed and standardize the manual, error-prone work of assessing compliance with framework controls, collecting evidence, building risk registries, and tracking progress, few reconcile the goals of the end user (i.e., time savings, risk reduction, better visibility) with the business aims of their security providers.  

“There are three things ingrained in my brain from time at companies like eSentire and Securonix: drive top line growth, improve net retention, and optimize margins,” Bakshi says. “And any solutions that I was bringing to market, whether it was for an MDR company or enabling another MDR company or an MSP, had to address at least two of these three problems.”  

“We have the opportunity to address all three. Apptega is absolutely right in the middle of that slipstream of creating new offerings, improving net retention, driving more value conversations with your customers, and improving margins through scale and operational efficiencies.”  

The question is, how exactly?  

Apptega offers a full-lifecycle compliance platform that aligns to the technology stacks and services of managed security providers. By partnering with these providers, Apptega is helping map those services and tools to the tasks that must be accomplished to meet the requirements of common security and compliance frameworks.  

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Apptega empowers providers to:  

• Bring to market new continuous security and compliance offerings, from gap assessment to audit.  
  
  
• Standardize and validate their existing cybersecurity services by packaging them in a way that satisfies frameworks like PCI and CMMC.  

• Drive more value, while increasing customer retention, by converting advisory engagements into long-term relationships.  

“When I think very high level about our product roadmap and the opportunities that we have as a business, I’m so excited to be able to come forward and partner with the service provider space so we can help them in their journey of bringing new offerings to market and improving their differentiation.”

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Added Bakshi, who has a hell-yeah-brother demeanor, “We can make this easy. We can take the complexity out of it. And we can turn this from an episodic, check-the-box event to a continuous state of security and compliance. Let’s do it.”  

Read the press release to learn more about Rahul Bakshi and the start of his Apptega journey.

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