Aryaka, the leader in Unified SASE solutions, announced the appointment of Shailesh Shukla as CEO and chairman, effective immediately. Shukla had earlier joined Aryaka as an independent board member and has served as Aryaka’s Executive Chairman of the Board since September 2023.
Shukla has more than 25 years’ experience, with extensive domain expertise in cloud, networking, and cybersecurity. He joins Aryaka after helping build the multi-billion-dollar Networking and Security business at Google Cloud as the Vice President and General Manager. Over the course of his professional career, Shukla has built growth businesses and teams for both entrepreneurial startups, like Instart Logic and Redback Networks, and also for at-scale companies like such as Google and Cisco Systems. His prior roles include Chief Operating Officer at Instart and VP/GM of several routing and software businesses at Cisco.
“We’re very excited to bring a well-known industry leader like Shailesh as CEO and chairman to lead Aryaka’s business,” said Aryaka investor and Board member Rob Schwartz of Third Point Ventures. “He’s had a tremendous track record of success in everything he’s done, with a particular mastery of networking and security, as well as scaling companies to their next stage of growth. He’s the ideal person to lead this company as it revolutionizes the industry and elevates SASE to new heights.”
Shukla takes over as CEO and chairman at a critical juncture for Aryaka. The SASE market is booming, fueled by the need to secure increasingly complex and distributed applications riding on hybrid cloud and data-center based IT infrastructures accessed by users around the globe. However, navigating fragmented vendors, consistently securing distributed users and applications, managing integrations, and adapting to constantly evolving threats pose significant challenges to enterprises. Aryaka precisely addresses these issues with its Unified SASE solution that provides a one-of-a-kind distributed policy enforcement, unified control plane, and single-pane-of-glass management that guarantees optimal network and security performance, according to the statement.
“Working closely with Aryaka and its customers over the last five months, I’ve been extremely impressed with the capability and innovations from the team, as well as the recent customer wins such as Cathay Pacific’s global SASE deployment,” said Shukla. “It’s an honor for me to lead Aryaka, with its incredible group of people and technical assets, and propel the company to its next phase of growth. Aryaka has already reached the $100M ARR milestone that 98% of venture-backed companies never do. Now that the markets for networking and security are converging, we have an opportunity for Aryaka to become the next billion-dollar security industry player.”
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