In a threat landscape where AI is reshaping both attacks and defenses, the ITSPs and vendors best positioned to help their customers are the ones led by people who treat cybersecurity as a leadership discipline, not just a technical one.
That's precisely the approach Subramani Rao brings to the GTIA UK & Ireland cybersecurity community. A CISSP-certified cybersecurity leader with a career spanning cloud, telecom and enterprise security, including roles at Acronis, Fortinet, F5 Networks and TCS, Rao has built an international reputation for turning complex security and compliance challenges into practical, business-ready strategy.
It's why GTIA member voters selected Rao for the 2026 UK & Ireland Cybersecurity Leadership Award, recognising his outstanding commitment, leadership, passion and professionalism in support of GTIA Cybersecurity Programs. His influence within the community shows up in how MSPs and distributors are starting to talk about security, less about individual products, more about resilience, accountability and business outcomes.
We asked Rao what's driving the shift toward resilience-led security strategy in the channel, and what advice he has for ITSPs looking to build stronger cyber resilience. Here's what he had to say.
What accomplishment or initiative are you most proud of that led to this award?
Developing “A 3-Step Blueprint for Strategic Security Leaders,” practical, actionable guidance rather than a one-off talk, that I introduced at the GTIA UK & Ireland Community Forum in Dublin this February. It's built around leadership accountability in the age of agentic AI, and hearing from MSPs and distributors since that it's genuinely shifted how they think about resilience versus reactive security is what makes it worth being proud of. Alongside that, the mentoring work matters just as much to me, helping early-career professionals build structured, CISSP-aligned paths into security leadership. It's quieter than anything on a stage, but it's probably got the longer tail of impact.
Where do you see the IT channel heading right now, and what trends do you think will define the next few years?
Generic IT support is disappearing. The channel is being compelled to pick a niche, whether that's compliance, cyber resilience or a specific vertical, and build real depth there rather than trying to be everything to everyone. Beyond that, MSPs and distributors are increasingly being asked to speak the language of leadership and governance, not just technology, especially as agentic AI reshapes both the attack surface and the tools defenders have available.
Compliance is being reframed too, conversations happening across the community keep landing on the idea that compliance is a leadership responsibility, not something you bolt onto the technical team. Add in NIS2 and tightening GDPR-adjacent regulation, and the next few years will reward channel leaders who've committed to a specialism deep enough to hold a boardroom conversation as comfortably as a technical one.
What keeps you or your team motivated to keep innovating and leading within the GTIA community?
The challenges are many, but so are the opportunities, and that's exactly what motivates me. I think about the impact we can make on small and medium businesses and through them on real communities, on local governments, on everything around us that depends on them staying safe and operational. That ripple effect keeps me going far more than any single win. There's also a quieter marker of success I don't think gets enough credit: There is simply more cybersecurity literacy across the community today than there was ten years ago. More people asking the right questions, more people aware of the risks before they become incidents. That shift, on its own, is success.
What's a lesson or unexpected insight you've picked up through your work with GTIA?
We presume that successful MSPs and established businesses have got it all figured out. But even the most well-established players sometimes struggle to step back from their own norm and look at a problem with fresh eyes, expertise can be its own blind spot. The unexpected insight for me has been how much value there is in the basic questions. There's no such thing as a bad question, and no such thing as advice that's too simple to matter. Some of the most useful conversations I've had within GTIA started from something straightforward that everyone assumed was already solved.
What impact do you hope your work has on the industry, or on the next generation of channel leaders?
My approach has always been to plan for the worst-case scenario, not just the probable one. Protect, detect and mitigate matter, but they don't answer the harder question every leader eventually has to face: how do you respond and recover when an incident happens regardless? I've spent a meaningful part of my career advocating for cyber resilience for exactly that reason, and I've watched the industry gradually shift from a purely defensive posture toward genuine recovery capability. The impact I hope to have is this: Resilience doesn't require expensive tooling to get started. Any leader can begin simply by asking the right question, what happens if this goes wrong and how do we ensure the business and everyone depending on it is protected regardless of outcome. That single question puts an organisation ahead of where most start.
See the full list of 2026 UK & Ireland Spotlight Award Winners.
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