Yazad Khandhadia is Vice President, Security Architecture & Engineering at Emirates NBD - a leading financial institution in the UAE with operations in international locations such as Singapore, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, India, Egypt & the United Kingdom.

He possesses 15 years of experience in the field of cyber security and has worked in cross functional domains which include cyber security strategy & program management security architecture & design, business information security, governance, risk management & compliance (GRC), security awareness, identity & access management, threat & vulnerability management and cyber security operations, which include, incident analysis, investigation, remediation and coordination with legal, compliance and corporate communications divisions.

In his current role, he is responsible for embedding security best practices & culture within Emirates NBD as part of a group wide digital transformation program that uses Agile methodologies. He currently leads the cyber security “Purple Team” within his organization – which creates & enforces People, Process & Technology security controls for Data Privacy, Confidentiality, Integrity, Availability and Resilience across all information systems used by customers, business partners and employees and encompass threats including but not limited to malware, insider threat, distributed denial of service (DDoS), injection & account take over attacks.

He acts as the primary point of contact for cyber security advice for business executives and deals with heterogenous stakeholders in areas such as retail & corporate banking, treasury, back office operations, procurement, operational risk, audit, compliance and legal. He is also responsible for reviewing legal contracts & master services agreements in order to ensure that the right cyber & data security clauses, that will protect the organization, are present and also conducts cyber security assessments & audits of third-party organizations that are used for purposes of outsourcing.

Yazad holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics & a master’s degree in International Business and is certified in Data Privacy (CIPP/CIPT), Cloud Security (CCSK) and general information security& audit disciplines (CISSP, CISM, CISA).

His current focus is on securing technologies like Infrastructure/Platform-as-a-Service (IaaS/PaaS), Public Cloud (Software-as-a-Service / SaaS), real time streaming, containers, service mesh, APIs & embedding security automation to roll out products and services in a secured and agile manner to stakeholders.

He is passionate about educating, mentoring and encouraging students to venture into cyber security as a profession and is currently Adjunct Faculty at Middlesex University in Dubai, UAE.