Cloud adoption in business is reliant on Navaneedha Jagathesan and other back-end experts

Since most businesses don’t know where to start when it comes to this major transformation, it’s critical that professionals like Navaneedha Jagathesan are on the front lines of cloud technology to help support the global adoption of cloud technology. As a senior cloud technical account manager at Amazon Web Services, the leading cloud computing platform in the world, Jagathesan spends his career designing new features and capabilities, enhancing cloud-based offerings, and helping implement the cloud for his clients.

Tasked with representing AWS within the customer environment, Jagathesan turns each client’s business needs into technical task items and helps them understand how the technology comes together. With data security and privacy being talked about in every boardroom, Jagathesan’s role expands beyond implementation and understanding business needs; he’s the last preventative line of defense when it comes to cybersecurity.

Although he works as a back-end programmer today, young Jagathesan had his sights set on front-end development. It wasn’t until he was working through his master’s degree at Wichita State University that his classes and research assistantship opened his eyes to the gravity and importance of back-end development. From that moment on, Jagathesan began learning everything he could to become an expert and thought leader in the field. He’s had many major contributions in a short time; boosting revenue, cutting costs, and helping businesses operate more efficiently through technology are some of the ways his work makes an impact.

Jagathesan has worked closely with many large, cutting-edge companies like Uber, Stripe, Reddit, and Sharethrough, achieving over $1m in savings for his customers in the last five years alone. One client, Uber, had been working diligently to find a new way to automate their security assessment, but kept running into roadblocks and delaying delivery timelines. When Jagathesan stepped in, he worked with the Uber security team and the Amazon product manager to understand how Inspector NEXT could be used by Uber to achieve its business goals.

Eventually, after many meetings with Uber executives and a lot of planning, Jagathesan succeeded in starting a proof-of-concept on two of the client’s accounts. After the PoC was completed, an eager Uber team increased their usage of Amazon Inspector NEXT from two accounts to over 200 AWS accounts. This is just one example of how Jagathesan worked to understand the business goals, learned what was required on the technology side, and used his expertise to find the meeting point between the two priorities.

Today, Uber has an automated and centralised vulnerability management solution, conducts proactive software vulnerability scans, and maintains near-real-time patches. In a public statement, Uber’s security engineering manager said: “By leveraging our already in-use systems manager agents with Inspector, we automated continuous remediation and simplified operations with one-click onboarding, centralised controls, and operational visibility… The use of Inspector has drastically reduced the mean time to remediate for Uber.”

In a rapidly-changing world, business leaders all over the globe need to spend more time understanding technology’s impact on their work and how to work with the force of the industry instead of swimming against it. With Jagathesan guiding clients through the changes ahead, we all get to experience a world where our customer information is safe, businesses operate in a way that makes the most sense, and decisions are made based on data. With every new cloud implementation or troubleshooting call, Jagathesan is directly impacting our futures – yours, mine, and everyone in between.