As India accelerates its journey toward becoming a global digital powerhouse, the need for a future-ready workforce in artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and cybersecurity has never been more urgent. While the country produces millions of engineers each year, a critical gap persists between academic training and industry-ready skills, particularly in underserved regions like North-East India, where access to advanced digital infrastructure and specialised training remains limited.

Addressing this challenge, Women in Cloud has expanded its Cyber Resilience Centres of Excellence (CRCoEs) into the region as part of its broader #WICxSaksham2025 Bharat Cyber Suraksha Mission. The initiative aims to build a robust, inclusive talent pipeline by embedding industry-aligned curricula, hands-on cyber resilience labs, and certification pathways directly into university ecosystems. With a focus on emerging disciplines such as Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and DevSecOps, the programme seeks to prepare students for the realities of AI-driven, cloud-first enterprises.

In this interview with AI Spectrum, Chaitra Vedullapalli, Co-Founder of Women in Cloud, discusses the structural gaps in India’s digital talent ecosystem and how targeted interventions in regional universities can unlock large-scale workforce readiness. She highlights the importance of industry collaborations, outcome-driven skilling models, and measurable employment pathways in building a resilient digital economy. Vedullapalli also shares her perspective on how initiatives like the Saksham Partner Pledge can bridge the gap between certification and careers, while positioning India as a global leader in AI-powered and cyber-resilient infrastructure.

The expansion of Cyber Resilience Centres of Excellence in North-East India marks a strategic move. What gap in the regional AI and cybersecurity ecosystem is Women in Cloud aiming to address through this initiative?

India is on track to become a $7 trillion economy by 2030. The government's Digital India mission has connected over 800 million citizens. AI investment is surging. Cloud adoption in enterprises is accelerating faster than almost any other major economy. And yet a critical, strategic gap sits quietly at the centre of this ambition: the country produces millions of engineers annually, but the pipeline for cybersecurity-ready, AI-fluent, cloud-certified professionals is fractured, inequitable, and dangerously thin, especially in the regions that need it most.

Our aim is to address the gap that is both structural and urgent in nature. Historically, North-East India has been neglected and it continues to be underserved when it comes to industry-aligned AI and cybersecurity skilling infrastructure. A recent data by the Ministry of Home Affairs revealed that there were 47,000 reported cyber incidents across India's eight North-Eastern states. This highlights that there is an urgent need for enhanced regional cyber resilience across these states.

That gap isn't a talent problem. It's a preparation problem. And Women in Cloud, in partnership with Veeam Software and aligned with Prime Minister Modi's Viksit Bharat vision, just launched one of the most consequential answers to it: the #WICxSaksham2025 Bharat Cyber Suraksha Mission, a 3-year national workforce development initiative targeting one million certified professionals in AI, Cloud, and Cybersecurity by 2030. This is the blueprint for a cyber-resilient national infrastructure built from the ground up, starting in the most underserved corners of the country: North-East India.

The expansion of Cyber Resilience Centres of Excellence (CRCoEs) into North-East India isn't symbolic. It's surgical. The region encompassing states like Assam, Meghalaya, Manipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram has historically been among India's most digitally underserved. Internet penetration is growing rapidly, but the supporting infrastructure for AI talent development and cybersecurity education has remained largely absent. Most students in these regions graduate without exposure to cloud platforms, zero-trust architectures, or threat intelligence frameworks.

To address this gap, we have created a framework wherein we would be working closely with academic institutions to embed industry-aligned curricula, DevSecOps training, ransomware protection capabilities, and resilience frameworks into university ecosystems. The overall objective is very simple: we have to transform campuses into workforce acceleration hubs.

We will create a direct bridge between certified talent and real employment opportunities, ensuring workforce readiness aligns with industry expansion.

Under the 'Main Hoon Saksham' movement, students are being trained in Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) fundamentals. How critical is this skillset in the evolving AI-driven enterprise landscape, particularly with rising ransomware and cloud security threats?

Let me give you a number that should stop every CIO in their tracks: according to IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report, the global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million, the highest ever recorded. In India, the cost per breach has risen 39 per cent over the past three years. And the attack surface is expanding exponentially as enterprises race to deploy AI workloads in multi-cloud environments.

Into this landscape walks Data Security Posture Management (DSPM) and most university graduates have never been taught it exists. DSPM is the need of the hour. It is important because it is the foundation to how modern enterprises manage security risk in an AI-driven world. With all businesses moving to a cloud ecosystem, enterprises are trying to integrate AI into their core operations. DSPM is the discipline of continuously discovering, classifying, and securing data across cloud environments. In an AI-powered enterprise, data is the fuel. It flows across SaaS platforms, data lakes, AI training pipelines, and third-party APIs often with inconsistent controls, misconfigurations, and blind spots that attackers exploit in hours, not days. Ransomware groups have shifted from encrypting endpoints to exfiltrating sensitive cloud data before triggering encryption—a double-extortion model that DSPM training specifically equips professionals to detect and prevent.

Recently, we trained students in DSPM fundamentals and it was a part of our ‘Main Hoon Saksham’ initiative. Through this endeavour we would be building a generation of professionals who understand foundational data security skills and become part of India’s national digital workforce movement. Participating students are getting an opportunity for structured learning pathways in Data Security Posture Management fundamentals. This will enable them to gain visibility to employers committed to hiring certified talent.

Most university cybersecurity curricula are built around 5-to-7-year-old frameworks. They teach perimeter defence in a world that no longer has a perimeter. They teach compliance checklists in a world that demands continuous posture monitoring. They teach theory in an environment where the threat actors are running live experiments on production systems. The 'Main Hoon Saksham' movement's decision to embed DSPM fundamentals directly into student training is a paradigm shift from reactive to proactive security education. DSPM is not advanced cybersecurity. In the AI era, it is foundational cybersecurity. Training students in it is not a luxury; it is a survival skill for every enterprise they will ever work for.

How does the collaboration with Veeam Software strengthen the practical, industry-aligned nature of these certification pathways compared to traditional academic cybersecurity programs?

This will bridge the gap between traditional academic cybersecurity programs and real-life experiences. This program will expose students to the frameworks, tools, and operational models that enterprises actually use when responding to threats, recovering from incidents, and maintaining data resilience at scale. We are witnessing a great interest from institutes who are committed to creating structured investment, executive sponsorship, faculty engagement, and measurable certification outcomes aligned with the national goal of certifying one million professionals by 2030.

We need to create a digital future that is based on resilient institutions, activated employers, and prepared individuals. Through this public-private collaboration, Women in Cloud and Veeam are strengthening the foundation for a secure, inclusive, and AI-ready India.

The Three Dimensions Where Industry Partnership Wins

Employer Trust: Veeam's brand signals that the certification meets enterprise standards, not just academic ones. Hiring managers at companies already using Veeam infrastructure know exactly what a certified candidate can do.

Scenario Relevance: Industry partners design training around actual threat scenarios, not hypothetical ones. Ransomware simulations, backup failure drills, and cloud misconfiguration audits reflect what professionals will encounter on day one.

Career Continuity: Vendor certifications create stackable, portable credentials. A student certified through this program can build toward higher Veeam, Microsoft, or AWS credentials—creating a credentialing ladder that academic degrees alone don't provide.

The result is a certification pathway that doesn't compete with academia; it complements it.

DevSecOps is emerging as a core capability in AI-powered enterprises. How are the hands-on cyber resilience labs and faculty enablement programs structured to build real-world DevSecOps competencies?

Here's the uncomfortable truth about DevSecOps in most Indian enterprises: it's aspirational branding over operational reality. Organisations announce 'shift left' security strategies. They invest in DevOps pipelines. They add 'Sec' to the name. But when the sprint cycles accelerate and the delivery pressure mounts, security becomes an afterthought again—and the developers, who were never trained to think like security engineers, default to what they know.

The structural solution isn't more policy. It's training developers and security professionals to share a mental model from the start. DevSecOps represents a fundamental shift in how security is practised. Women in Cloud is advancing structured certification pathways, faculty enablement programs, and hands-on cyber resilience labs that are designed for DevSecOps talent ecosystem.

Our cyber resilience labs are structured around applied and scenario-based learning that mirrors how DevSecOps functions in real-life situations. We have created modules in which students work through integrated exercises that span threat modelling, secure coding practices, continuous monitoring, incident response, and data resilience. These are not isolated modules, but are interconnected disciplines the way a DevSecOps practitioner encounters them on the job.

The hands-on cyber resilience labs within our program are built around this insight. Rather than teaching DevSecOps as a separate track layered onto existing development training, the labs integrate security thinking into every phase of the build cycle. Students learn to threat-model applications during design, implement security gates in CI/CD pipelines, conduct SAST and DAST scans as routine workflow steps, and respond to security findings as part of sprint retrospectives, not as emergency escalations.

The faculty enablement programs embedded in this initiative may be its most strategically underrated component. A single professor trained in current DevSecOps practices and equipped with up-to-date lab environments can influence 500 students over a 5-year career. Scale that across 100 universities and you're not building a workforce, you're building a workforce factory. The professors who go through this program don't just become better teachers—they become industry bridges, connecting their institutions to employer ecosystems that previously felt inaccessible from Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities. DevSecOps is not a job title. It is a culture. And culture starts in the classroom, not the conference room.

The Saksham Partner Pledge seeks to directly connect certified students with employers. How do you plan to ensure measurable outcomes in terms of job placements, enterprise adoption, and long-term talent retention in the region?

Our Saksham Partner Pledge invites enterprises, cloud providers, data centre operators, and technology companies to activate hiring pipelines, sponsor certifications, and collaborate with universities to strengthen India’s cyber-ready workforce. Let's be honest, training programs that don't produce employment outcomes aren't workforce development. They're expensive, hope.

The Saksham Partner Pledge is the mechanism that converts certification into a career.

It is built on a simple but powerful premise – creating an employment-ready workforce. It is a structured commitment with accountability built in. It's the structural link between the supply side (certified graduates) and the demand side (corporate hiring) and its effectiveness will be determined by three variables: specificity of commitment, quality of matching, and accountability for outcomes.

How Measurable Outcomes Get Built In

Employer Pre-Commitment: Partner companies don't just agree to 'consider' certified candidates; they commit to specific hiring targets, defined roles, and minimum compensation floors.

Skills-to-Role Mapping: The certification framework is designed in reverse, starting from the job descriptions of participating employers and building backwards to define what competencies need to be certified.

Cohort Tracking and Public Reporting: Long-term talent retention requires accountability infrastructure. The program's commitment to tracking 12-month and 36-month employment outcomes and reporting them publicly creates the feedback loop that forces continuous curriculum improvement.

The 25,000 job pathways goal is ambitious. But it's achievable because it's not a placement promise. It's a systematic infrastructure built. The difference between a placement promise and infrastructure is the difference between a one-time event and a self-sustaining machine.

With Viksit Bharat emphasising digital sovereignty and resilience, how can regional university-led cyber and AI ecosystems contribute to India's ambition of becoming a global AI powerhouse?

Viksit Bharat's vision of digital sovereignty isn't just about building Indian-owned platforms; it's about building Indian-owned capability at every level of the technology stack. India’s digital future depends on resilient institutions, activated employers, and prepared individuals.

I believe the real success stories will rise from our partnerships with regional universities where women still don’t or have limited access to AI and cybersecurity training modules. Regional universities will be the engine of growth as they would now have access to industry partnership, the structured frameworks, and global skilling connections to translate that potential into AI and cybersecurity-ready talent at scale. That is precisely what the Saksham Bharat Initiative is designed to provide.

A nation that can defend its own cloud infrastructure, audit its own AI systems, and train its own security professionals isn't dependent on foreign vendors to protect its most critical assets. That independence is both an economic advantage and a national security imperative.

The CRCoEs being built through #WICxSaksham are the physical infrastructure of that sovereignty. When a university in Manipur has a functioning cybersecurity lab with real enterprise tooling, faculty trained to current industry standards, and employer connections that create local career pathways, it becomes a permanent node in India's cyber defence network. Not a one-time program. Infrastructure. India's path to becoming a global AI powerhouse does not run through Bangalore alone. It runs through every university that decides to become a node in the national digital resilience grid.