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Today, we sit down with Karthik Natarajan, Solutions Engineering Manager, U.S. Public Sector, for SNYK.

SNYK has garnered a formidable reputation in the commercial sector by helping to identify and fix vulnerabilities in code, open-source dependencies, and container images.

Karthik Natarajan acknowledges that no code can be 100% secure; however, one way to improve by a magnitude is to incorporate the “Shift Left” approach. This phrase has been around for twenty years but has recently gained momentum.

The concept of shift left moves testing and performance evaluation to an earlier part of the software development lifecycle. But SNYK goes further by applying AI to look at open-source dependencies.

When infrastructure transitions to “infrastructure as code,” vulnerabilities may be included. SNYK also looks for vulnerabilities in infrastructure code.

The interview ends with Karthik explaining that SNYK’s success is due to it being written for cloud applications- it is cloud native.  Also, they judiciously use AI and rigorously check corrections to code that may introduce trouble.