WeAreDelphix: Hims Pawar

What do you do at Delphix and what inspired you to join the company?

I am a principal solution architect for the Field Services team at Delphix. I work closely with our customers across multiple industries to showcase our technology and help them reap the most value from the Delphix platform.

In my role, I have the unique opportunity to be an advisor and an architect, striving to deeply understand the needs and situations of our customers’ IT organizations and help establish the best possible solutions. I love being part of this company because of the people. I lead a very demanding and dynamic team of distinguished engineers who can solve any problem thrown at them, and they fill me with new energy every morning.

You can ask me anything about…?

Cybersecurity. I have spent almost two decades exploring and learning about various threats and risks at enterprise businesses, and helping IT leaders design and implement solutions to strengthen security. If you ever find yourself thinking about your company’s security posture, you would be amazed to learn about all the different aspects and controls put in place to protect an enterprise from cyberattacks.

Many folks believe that encrypting everything will solve all their security challenges, but little do they know that they are only solving the “man in the middle” attack. In my experience with CIOs/CISO running DevSecOps organizations, many new facets of the problems are undercovered. From GRC (governance, risk management, and compliance) to application modernization to cloud migration, every change brings a new set of challenges.

With that said, my expertise is in debunking data myths and helping clients realize the true value of their data while managing its threats and vulnerabilities.

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on at Delphix?

The one that really jumps out at me is a project with one of our customers in the financial services industry. This customer had a very limited view of their data landscape, which put them in a precarious situation when they were managing millions of customer accounts. There was a gap in understanding every data touch point inside and outside the bank. It was a very complex problem to solve because of the tremendous amount of data across various lines of businesses with a growing focus of industry on data-driven analytics.

When you are dealing with petabytes of data that are exploding in size every minute, my team and I had to think out of the box in order to provide a sustainable answer to the problem, which would not fail when the unprecedented scale of things come into picture.

The complexity of the data was the next biggest challenge as the customer had every possible data source in their portfolio—from legacy mainframe applications to modern data lakes. I thoroughly enjoyed applying my understanding of the concepts of data engineering to test in a plethora of systems consisting of infinite data as well as testing something new everyday during this journey.

While it took us several months to prove the value of our technology to their key stakeholders, we successfully won the deal, and they implemented our platform across the entire enterprise across multiple business units as a shared service, enabling SRE across systems, processes, and people. As a result, Delphix was inducted into their Hall of Innovation for Outstanding Data Delivery.

What’s your secret talent?

I have a deep interest in yoga and what it can do for mental health and the body. I’m getting pretty close to mastering headstands and side-crow poses.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

“Every action you take is a vote for the type of person you wish to become” by James Clear. You choose who you want to be identified as and work towards that goal every single day for the rest of your life. If you’re able to get 1% better each day, you have the opportunity to drive massive progress in your life and master continuous improvement.

What song instantly puts you in a good mood?

A Lovely Day by Bill Withers. Living in a fast paced, high-stress lifestyle in NYC isn’t always easy. But this song calms me down and helps me appreciate the little joys of life, reminding me that the best things in life are not things.

What drives you every day?

Continuous learning. When you are fighting adversaries, you have to level up constantly. I love to stay ahead of the game and hone my skills by pushing myself to learn new technologies and trends. Most recently, I graduated from an Executive Masters program from Columbia University, and it was a life changing experience. I am privileged to have a career that empowers me to constantly grow, and I’m thankful to have a wonderful team supporting me in all of my endeavours.