Ashit Vora

A-Squared Capital is a private firm that invests to hold for the long term – providing expertise, capital and support to management teams with the intention to help companies thrive for many years to come.

Ashit joined Intertek as a result of Acumen’s acquisition. At Intertek, he led the Acumen business unit as a wholly owned subsidiary. During his time at Intertek, Acumen continued it’s meteoric rise dominating the FIPS/Common Criteria certification industry.

Founded in 2014, grew Acumen to be the top certification service provided in the industry. Few key stats and achievements: 1. Fastest company to get accredited for FIPS and CC certifications 2. First (and only!) private CC lab in India 3. Consistently ranked as a top 3 certification lab globally (2017-2021) 4. Wide range of customers from Fortune 10, 100, 500, mid-size and start-ups 5. Home to one of the largest FIPS/CC teams in the world 6. Only company in the industry with a dedicated software dev team addressing both customer needs as well as developing an industry leading automation platform Following Acumen’s meteoric rise, Ashit orchestrated a very successful acquisition by Intertek Group Plc. Ashit stayed on post acquisition leading the Acumen business unit (under Connected World GBL).

Took over the responsibility of managing the Common Criteria and FIPS certification team (11 direct reports) there by being responsible for enablement and protection of about $1.2 Billion in revenue. Key responsibilities include: - Ensuring successful execution of FIPS and CC certification efforts - Work closely with sales to define certification priorities - Building relationships and partnerships with certifying bodies such as NIAP, CMVP, CESG, BSI, ASD, STQC etc. - Managing certification costs to ensure we can do more with less - Interfacing with independent third part laboratories globally and managing their performance - Contract and pricing negotiations - Working closely wit government affairs and providing technical input to policy initiatives Key achievements - Increased team headcount with zero attrition - Increase PS revenue protection by not only doing more certifications but doing certifications smartly leveraging common modules - Successfully completing industry first triad evaluation by evaluating three similar products in three global CC schemes against the NDPP - Exhibiting thought leadership on entropy and coming up with actionable guidance to product teams on improving entropy sources. - Numerous examples of partnering with standards bodies and schemes to improve requirements in order to make them more relevant and in line with industry realities. Pushing back hard on "ivory tower" requirements - Key contributor in ensuring India becomes a certificate issuing nation. Publicly thanked by Dr. Rai (Director General CERT-IN) at ICCC 2013 for this contribution. - Increase certification efficiencies by introducing automated testing, template reuse, smart forms etc.

Working with the Global Certification Team helping Cisco's products achieve various government certifications such as FIPS, CC etc. Working across multiple BUs and outside consultants to align effort and resources, draw up schedules, prepare documents etc. Act as SME on FIPS 140 standards. Key achievements: - Streamlined FIPS certification process to reduce time to get evaluated - Conceptualized, pitched and executed consolidation of IOS crypto into a single crypto module in order to ease certification process and increase product security via limiting crypto footprint - Created key partnerships with certifying bodies such as CMVP - Advanced adoption of common crypto modules in order to reduce certification costs, time to market and increase product security - Participated in company wide crypto initiative in order to enumerate global crypto requirements output of which was used to define strategy for crypto certifications

I came to work for SAIC as a result of acquisition of Atlan in July '09. In addition to my responsibilities at Atlan, as a qualified PCI QSA, I am also working on PCI audits.

As a Manager, provide project leadership and oversight for teams testing and validating security products and solutions. Create and manage scope, schedule, client communication and project control measures. Generate quotes and proposals for new projects based on scope and complexity of project, man hours required and resource availability. Explore business opportunities to help company grow. In charge of recruiting new talent, and supervise training. As a qualified PCI QSA, help clients achieve PCI-DSS compliance. Conduct gap analysis, recommend solutions for deficiencies, and help clients through the various stages of a successful certification process. Past Experience: As a Senior Security Engineer, designed comprehensive test suites and performed compliance testing for various security products such as cryptographic service providers (DLLs, Windows kernel drivers), routers, firewalls, and switches. Formulated and managed tests for a wide variety of modules from Cisco, F-Secure, Microsoft, Nortel, RSA Security, Aruba Networks’ line of products.