Alan speaks with Shailesh Athalye, senior vice president of product management at Qualys, about how AI, automation, and integrated platforms are redefining the way enterprises approach cybersecurity and risk management.

Athalye notes that many organizations still operate in fragmented security environments—managing a patchwork of tools that generate endless alerts but little insight. The challenge, he says, isn’t a lack of data but the inability to correlate it meaningfully across hybrid environments. Modern enterprises need more than visibility; they need context and automation that help them act decisively.

He explains how Qualys is addressing this by unifying detection, response, and risk assessment into a single platform powered by AI-driven analytics. This approach allows organizations to prioritize vulnerabilities based on exploitability, automatically deploy remediations, and continuously measure cyber risk. The goal, Athalye emphasizes, is not to replace human expertise but to augment it—freeing security teams from manual, repetitive work so they can focus on strategy and resilience.

They also touch on the evolution of cyber hygiene as a business imperative. As regulatory pressure mounts and attack surfaces expand, organizations are realizing that resilience isn’t about reacting faster—it’s about building systems that prevent small issues from cascading into major breaches.

Athalye argues that AI will be central to this shift. By automating the correlation of massive telemetry sets and continuously refining risk models, security teams can finally keep pace with attackers operating at machine speed.

For enterprises striving to mature their security posture, his message is clear: the future of cyber resilience lies in connected intelligence—where visibility, context, and automation work together to turn defense into a continuous, proactive discipline.