The castle-and-moat cybersecurity strategy might just be as outdated as it sounds. In a world where work happens on phones in airports and laptops in coffee shops, the perimeter is porous by design. Attackers don’t need to batter the gates; they just use a stolen key. During the pandemic, cyber incidents surged: one study reported a 300% spike in data breaches, with ransomware attacks rising 90% over the same period.
Few understand these dynamics better than Venkat Gogineni, a seasoned IT leader whose career spans healthcare, telecom, and financial services. Working with clients such as Equifax, Walmart, AT&T, and now Baptist Health, Gogineni has steered infrastructure modernization and security transformations in some of the most demanding environments. A Senior Member of IEEE and editorial board member for the SARC and ESP journals, Gogineni brings a practitioner’s insight to what is fundamentally a systems-level challenge: building systems that are resilient not through bigger barriers and stronger perimeters, but through context-aware trust.
Trust Nothing, Verify Everything
Legacy security models granted broad internal access after a single sign-on, trusting anything within the network. Once inside, attackers exploit overly permissive roles and neglected access paths to move laterally, often undetected.
Zero trust architecture, sometimes referred to as ‘perimeterless security,’ replaces the “trusted inside” mindset with a simple rule: every request must be verified, every time. Access is granted only when required, revoked when unnecessary, and constantly reassessed based on context and behavior. For skeptics, this can sound like friction. But Gogineni offers a powerful counterexample: FirstNet, the nationwide broadband network built for emergency responders. Supporting over 5.5 million connections and nearly 30,000 organizations, FirstNet can’t tolerate login delays during a crisis.
At AT&T, Gogineni helped integrate multi-factor authentication into seamless single sign-on workflows for FirstNet. Security was enforced invisibly, allowing rapid access without compromising control. “You can’t have someone fumbling with credentials when lives are at stake,” he says. No extra steps, no delay; just security that moves at the speed of the mission.
The Identity Crisis
Behind the best implementations of zero trust are robust identity and access management frameworks. Surveys consistently show that most organizations are overhauling their IAM frameworks to enforce stronger authentication protocols. But modern IAM goes a step beyond login pages and password resets, governing everything from role alignment and access provisioning to risk scoring and behavioral signals.
At Equifax, in the wake of its 2017 breach, Gogineni led a sweeping cloud migration that doubled as an overhaul of the company’s IAM architecture, introducing continuous monitoring and automated remediation. Dormant accounts and lingering contractor credentials—common footholds for attackers—were identified and removed as part of an enterprise-wide risk reduction effort. Access provisioning became automated and policy-driven, closely tied to roles on a need basis.
This is where identity intersects with DevOps. Access to production environments or customer data is granted just-in-time, based on verified need. Permissions are context-aware, and minimal by design. “Every digital door you create, or forget to close, is one more point of entry,” Gogineni emphasizes.
Detecting the Unexpected
Even the most hardened IAM systems can’t stop what they can’t see. That’s why many organizations are adding user and entity behavior analytics as a critical piece of the enterprise IT stack. UEBA tools learn what “normal” looks like, per user or workflow, and flag deviations. One estimate puts UEBA false positives below 3%, a marked improvement over conventional SIEM platforms.
At Equifax, Gogineni led efforts to fold behavioral detection into the company’s broader security fabric, enabling detection of threats that signature-based tools often miss, such as polymorphic ransomware. The system monitored access patterns down to metadata changes, reducing false positives and accelerating triage.
For infrastructure and DevOps teams, these changes improve the signal-to-noise ratio of alerts. For security teams, they provide earlier warning and sharper visibility, allowing for earlier detection and a smarter response. And for the organization, it marks a shift away from playing defense after a breach to internal situational awareness, focused on prevention rather than containment.
Risk as the New Perimeter
In a hybrid world of cloud apps, distributed workforces, and constant third-party integrations, the concept of a defined inside and outside is quickly disappearing. What matters now, says Gogineni, is context: who is requesting access, from where, for what, and how that behavior aligns with expectations.
Gogineni puts it succinctly: “We can’t promise zero incidents. But we can drastically limit the blast radius.”
As IT and DevOps teams become stewards of security as well as performance, their choices, from infrastructure design to CI/CD policies, shape the organization’s risk profile. By moving away from perimeter thinking and embedding security into identities, they’re building systems that assume failure, and are ready for it. In that sense, the moat may be gone, but the floorplan fights back, and the sentries are getting smarter.
