Why Cybersecurity Needs Connectors, Not Gatekeepers

The Puzzle

Bharti found cybersecurity in a university cryptography module over 20 years ago. She never liked mathematics much, but watching how cryptography protects information was an entirely different story.

When she talks about what kept her in the field she does not mention salary or job security. She talks about puzzles.

"I view cyber security as a massive puzzle where you have to find all the different pieces, figure out how they fit together, and accept that no single area alone can solve the problem."

To Bharti, cybersecurity keeps rearranging itself, and that is exactly what keeps her interested. Two decades in, she says the pace of change is faster now than when she started.

She is now a Group Security Strategy Manager at Computacenter, having worked her way there from IT support and through security pre-sales engineering, over two decades in the industry. For a lot of that time, she was the only woman on her team. That is part of why she now leads Computacenter's Women in Cyber group and mentors people trying to break in, on her own time. Her TEDx talk, "Why we need the old boys' network for women in business," is online if you want the longer version of her argument.

The recognition has followed. Nominations for the CRN Women in Channel Awards and CompTIA's Advocate for Women in Tech, a finalist spot at the Computing Women in Tech Excellence Awards, and Eskenzi PR's Most Inspiring Women in Cyber. She made the Tech Women Celebration 50 list in 2024, the CRN A-List in 2025, and the Oxygen Influencers Top 20 in 2025.

The Missing Piece

Cybersecurity, for Bharti, is an industry with a knowledge sharing problem. When she started, there were barely any women in the room and no dedicated networking groups; people networked with people who already looked like them. Diversity and community have both improved since, but access to knowledge has not kept pace. A webinar is fine as far as it goes, she says, but real skill comes from hands-on, practical experience, and that kind of access still is not spread evenly across the industry.

Community built Bharti's career. The network she found gave her visibility she would not have had otherwise and put her in front of people in roles she had never worked in. It also created a space where she could learn from women and men she actually trusted. Mentors, role models, sponsors, career moves: she traces all of it back to that same source. And when people watch someone else break through, she says, it tells the next person the ceiling is not real, if they want it badly enough.

Connectors, Not Gatekeepers

Ask Bharti what she would change about the industry, and she skips straight past budgets and tools. She talks about who gets to walk through the door in the first place.

"We need to shift from being gatekeepers to being connectors."

Cliques are still the biggest barrier to entry in cybersecurity, she says. Gatekeeping is what keeps them standing. She makes a habit of introducing people to each other rather than protecting her own network. A real community, in her view, runs on people sharing what they know. Not on people keeping it to themselves.

It is also why she joined Cyberr as a founding member: to grow that same kind of community across the wider industry. That is the shift Bharti is pushing for, one introduction at a time.