Views From The Top

Can a CTO of a major corporation be in their 20s or 30s these days? He doesn't think so.

"It depends on the business that they are in. A CTO is a role you have to bridge technology and business," Gupta said. "Being a CTO at technology provider means you have to strike a balance. If they can't do that, they can't be successful."

As the CTO, he worries about threats to CA's overall infrastructure. "The biggest threats have to do with damage and loss of information," Gupta said. "This is why some of our servers aren't accessible via the Web."

What about his biggest challenge in protecting his end-user population? "It is when someone is on the road or at home and they download stuff onto their PCs," Gupta said.

Even though every CA laptop and desktop has various automated protection technologies that get pushed down, it still is a never-ending battle to keep the bad guys from compromising their systems (a small comfort for those of us that fight this battle personally).

Gupta has been around the technology industry for several decades, and it shows.

"We think adoption will always happen much faster this time around; we are all guilty of thinking this. We tend to forget it when we see a new technology that we are excited about," Gupta said. "The hype hits, then you get fragmented solutions that slow down adoption, then things gel."

The Internet, for example, is not new, Gupta said. "It took more than 30 years to mature, but the key thing was that it leveraged the existing telephone network infrastructure," he said.