'India developers exceptional, but talent shortage issue is structural'

India is home to the second-largest developer base for GitHub, the world’s largest platform for storing, hosting and sharing code. Data shared exclusively with Mint by GitHub revealed India to have over 11.4 million individual developers on the platform, while over 440,000 Indian companies also host and share their code through the platform.

- Shouvik Das

All this contributed to nearly 30 million code repositories on GitHub by Indian users. In an interview, Mike Hanley, chief security officer and senior vice-president of engineering at GitHub, spoke about how, despite these figures and the advent of generative AI, the shortage of cyber security talent remains acute in India and globally, what the platform is doing to tackle growing cyber attacks, and why training professionals is not the only way to address the talent shortage. Edited excerpts:

What is GitHub doing in terms of its contribution to the cybersecurity developer community?