Aditya Vardhan Named VP IT And Group CISO At Jindal Steel
Aditya Vardhan has been appointed vice president for IT and group chief information security officer at Jindal Steel, taking responsibility for cyber strategy, security architecture and governance across the group.
- Role: vice president IT and group chief information security officer, Jindal Steel Ltd
- Scope: IT, operational technology, cloud, data and AI environments
- Also leads: the privacy programme, and governance, risk and compliance
- Plus: operations and governance of the group's global capability centre IT centre of excellence
- Experience: more than 25 years in enterprise security, risk and resilience
What Aditya Vardhan Is Being Asked To Secure
The brief names operational technology alongside IT, and that single word changes the shape of the job. A steel plant runs on control systems that manage furnaces, rolling mills and material handling, much of it installed long before anyone expected it to be reachable from a corporate network, and a good deal of it impossible to patch on a convenient schedule because taking it offline means stopping production.
Securing that is a different discipline from securing a data centre. In IT the worst case is usually data loss. In operational technology the worst case is physical: equipment damage, a halted line, or a safety system that does not behave as expected.
The Rest Of The Mandate Is Just As Broad
He leads enterprise cyber resilience, information security and privacy across the group's India and global operations, and oversees security for IT, operational technology and AI environments with a stated aim of enabling secure digital transformation rather than blocking it. Within the global capability centre he runs the IT centre of excellence, driving standards, risk oversight and business aligned execution.
Putting the centre of excellence and the security function under one person is a structural choice worth noticing. It means the group that builds and the group that polices are the same group, which removes a familiar standoff and concentrates a lot of accountability in one seat.
Where He Has Done This Before
His career covers security, risk and resilience programmes across complex global organisations, including work at PepsiCo, the Adani Group and Quess Corp. That is a span across consumer goods, infrastructure and services, which is useful preparation for a conglomerate structure where the operating realities differ sharply between units.
Heavy industry has become a more attractive target precisely as it has digitised, and the appointment reads as a company deciding that the plant floor needs the same attention the corporate network has had for years. More leadership moves.