Arun Kumar Elengovan Delivers Practical Cybersecurity Insights At Manipal Institute Of Technology

On the afternoon of January 24, 2026, students at Manipal Institute of Technology attended the Industry Specialized Lecture Series organized in partnership with the IEEE Student Club. What followed was not a routine technical session, but a thoughtful discussion shaped by real world experience that explored responsibility, resilience, and the human dimensions of cybersecurity.

Arun Kumar Elengovan, an engineering graduate of Anna University, has spent over 15 years working across distributed systems, cryptography, and enterprise-scale security. But rather than beginning with titles or achievements, he began with a misconception.

Now serving as Director of Engineering Security at Okta, Inc., he oversees teams protecting cloud identity management for more than 19,000 organizations worldwide. His work covers cryptography, cloud security, scalable system design and more. He also stays deeply engaged outside the office, delivering keynotes, peer reviewing research, and advising industry panels, making his visit to Manipal a natural fit.

“People picture cybersecurity as hackers wearing a black hoodie,” he told the audience. “But day to day, it’s much closer to reliability engineering designing systems that hold up when failures happen, because they always do.”

That framing set the tone. For Elengovan, security is not drama or headlines. It is discipline. It is preparation. It is systems thinking applied with accountability.

His journey into the field was shaped less by glamour and more by curiosity. Early in his career, while working on large scale enterprise systems, he noticed a recurring pattern: breaches rarely stemmed from dramatic, headline making exploits. They emerged from overlooked assets, weak visibility, or small lifecycle gaps that no one owned clearly. That realization shifted his focus from reacting to threats to understanding architecture.

He often returns to a simple principle: map what you have before you try to defend it. “If you properly understand your assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and impact,” he shared, “you’ll solve more problems than any shiny new tool can.” It’s advice that reflects both technical maturity and humility, a reminder that clarity often beats complexity.

As cloud environments expanded and traditional network boundaries blurred, Elengovan leaned deeply into identity and cryptography. He emphasizes that authentication and authorization are not interchangeable ideas one verifies who you are, the other defines what you can do. Confusing the two, he notes, quietly opens doors that should remain closed.

Yet even when discussing cryptography, he avoids abstract equations. Instead, he talks about key management, certificate lifecycles, and trust chains and about how many failures trace back not to broken mathematics but to human oversight. For him, technology is only as strong as the discipline behind it.

Throughout his career, he has remained closely connected to the broader professional community, contributing to discussions, reviewing research, and mentoring emerging engineers. As an IEEE Senior Member and Fellow of the Institution of Electronics and Telecommunication Engineers (IETE), he views professional recognition not as a milestone, but as a responsibility to give back.

When asked about the future, his tone becomes reflective. Artificial intelligence, he believes, introduces new layers of complexity, data integrity concerns, model manipulation, inference abuse. As AI integrates into critical systems, security failures may no longer be limited to financial loss; they could carry real-world safety implications. “Adaptability,” he stresses, “will define the next generation of engineers.”

Despite the technical depth of his field, his advice to students remains surprisingly simple. Cybersecurity, he explains, is not confined to coders or specialists. It spans engineering, governance, architecture, and operations. Certifications may open doors, but long-term growth depends on problem-solving ability, communication skills, and a willingness to keep learning long after formal education ends.

He encourages young professionals to build projects, contribute to open-source initiatives, and seek internships not for résumé points, but for perspective. Exposure to real systems, real failures, and real constraints shapes judgment in ways textbooks cannot.

In the end, Elengovan returns to the mindset that has guided his own path: security is not a checklist. It is a way of thinking. It demands curiosity, ownership, and the discipline to anticipate failure before it arrives.

For the students listening that day, the session offered more than technical insight. It offered a lens one that reframes cybersecurity not as a mysterious domain reserved for a few, but as a structured, thoughtful practice embedded within engineering itself.

As digital infrastructure becomes foundational to modern economies, the principles he emphasized are increasingly shaping how organizations approach long-term security resilience.