Federal Efforts to Secure Data and Build Resiliency

Kashif Ansari is the Senior Director of Sales Engineering at Commvault, where he has been instrumental in managing a significant portfolio since February 2021. Under his leadership, his team of 32 members oversees a $120 million business, focusing on the US East and US Federal sectors. Kashif is responsible for aligning the go-to-market strategy with sales, professional services, customer success, and corporate strategy, ensuring that his teams serve as trusted technical advisors to customers.

Prior to joining Commvault, Kashif held a prominent role at Dell Technologies from July 2000 to August 2020. As Vice President of Presales for the Americas Enterprise, he managed an organization of 550 members across the US, Canada, Brazil, and Mexico, handling an impressive quota of $18 billion. His earlier career includes a stint at Silicon Graphics Inc., where he specialized in High Performance Computing from 1995 to 2000.

Kashif earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science from the Rochester Institute of Technology in 1997.

Harry Coker, Jr. was confirmed by the Senate on December 12, 2023 as the second National Cyber Director in the Office of the National Cyber Director, the White House. Director Coker is a retired Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) senior executive and career Naval Officer, is a graduate of the US Naval Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, and Georgetown University Law Center.

Coker completed a joint duty assignment as the Executive Director of the National Security Agency (NSA). As the third in command of the largest component of the US Intelligence Community, he directly supported NSA’s Director and Deputy Director in the strategic and day-to-day leadership of the Agency. Coker’s service to the Nation and NSA was recognized with the awarding of the National Intelligence Distinguished Service Medal, the NSA Director’s Distinguished Service Medal, and the IC EEOD Outstanding Leadership Award.

During the first seventeen years of his service with the CIA, Coker was assigned to leadership positions in the Directorate of Digital Innovation; the Directorate of Science & Technology; and the Director’s Area. Key assignments included service as Director of the Open Source Enterprise, which is responsible for leveraging publicly available information; and as Deputy Director of CIA’s Office of Public Affairs, which is responsible for the Agency’s internal and external communications and media relations. Coker was also a member of the small, hand-selected team of senior officers that architected the Agency’s organizational construct and operating model. He also had a key role in formulating and executing the Diversity in Leadership Study; and served on the Executive Diversity & Inclusion Council. Coker’s leadership and contributions earned him the Presidential Rank Award and CIA’s prestigious Don Cryer Award for Diversity & Inclusion.

Dr. Laurie E. Locascio is currently the Under Secretary of Commerce for Standards and Technology and the director of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

From 2017 to 2022, Locascio served as vice president for research at the University of Maryland College Park and the University of Maryland Baltimore. She also served as a professor in the Fischell Department of Bioengineering at the A. James Clark School of Engineering with a secondary faculty appointment in the Department of Pharmacology in the School of Medicine. Before joining the university, she was at NIST for 31 years, rising from a research biomedical engineer to leading the agency’s Material Measurement Laboratory.

Locascio is a fellow of the National Academy of Inventors, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Chemical Society, and the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering. Dr. Locascio was recently elected to the National Academy of Engineering.

Govind Rangasamy, a serial entrepreneur, is the Founder and CEO of Appranix, now part of Commvault. With extensive experience in building products in the cloud automation and enterprise system management space, Govind founded Appranix with a belief that existing infrastructure-centric cloud and IT automation solutions are completely inadequate to handle resilience for cloud-scale applications. Prior to Appranix, Govind was the CEO of FogPanel, a multi-cloud service management company that he sold to UST Global. Before FogPanel, Govind led cloud solutions group at Actifio, a pioneer in the data management space. He also led products at Eucalyptus Systems, an AWS-compatible open-source private cloud pioneer. Prior to Eucalyptus, he successfully transformed HP’s Storage Management product line to be a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant. Govind’s extensive IT background started with engineering at PTC and multiple startups before starting his own companies.