Sanjiv Cherian
Sanjiv Cherian  |
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 Sanjiv Cherian |
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| Born | January 6, 1986 (age 40 years), Mumbai, India, Mumbai, India |
| Native name | Sanjiv Cherian |
| Nationality | British |
| Home town | Mumbai |
| Residence | Mumbai, India |
| Occupation | Entrepreneur |
| Years active | c. 2005 to present |
| Known for | Co-founder of Microminder Cyber Security; OT and critical national infrastructure security in the GCC; the AI Synergist™ concept |
| Website | Official website |
Sanjiv Cherian (born 6 January 1986) is a British cybersecurity executive and entrepreneur based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. He is a co-founder of Microminder Cyber Security, a CREST-certified and ISO 27001-accredited cybersecurity consultancy operating across the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, where he serves as Chief Commercial Officer.
Sanjiv Cherian's work focuses on the security of operational technology (OT), industrial control systems (ICS) and critical national infrastructure (CNI) in the Gulf Cooperation Council region, and on the application of artificial intelligence to enterprise security operations. He publishes under the concept of the AI Synergist™; a framework concerned with the deliberate pairing of human judgement with machine capability in enterprise risk contexts.
He is the author of the LinkedIn newsletter Candid Cyber Conversations, which addresses operational technology risk, third-party exposure and breach response for a readership of more than three thousand subscribers and has been quoted in the CISO Series podcast on the structural gap between the accountability assigned to security leaders and the authority granted to them.
Early life and education
Sanjiv Cherian was born in Mumbai, India, on 6 January 1986, and lived there until the age of twenty-one, when he relocated to the United Kingdom. He remained in London for nineteen years before moving to Dubai in November 2024. He began his post-secondary education at Rizvi College in Bandra, Mumbai, completing a diploma in hospitality management and tourism accredited by the American Hotel and Lodging Association in 2004. After moving to the United Kingdom in 2007, he completed a postgraduate diploma under Edexcel accreditation at the London College of Commerce and subsequently earned a Master of Business Administration from Liverpool John Moores University, studied through Kaplan International College in London and completed in 2011.
=Career
Early career
Sanjiv Cherian entered the cybersecurity industry in the United Kingdom, building a career across managed security services, penetration testing and vendor-aligned security consulting. His earlier roles included positions at Managed Security Services providers such as Caretower and Krome Technologies, and by early 2019 he was serving as Head of Consultancy at A&O IT Group. Over the course of two decades he worked across the energy, banking, government and critical infrastructure sectors in the United Kingdom, the Middle East and Asia.
In February 2021 he was one of thirty-eight industry figures invited by the United Kingdom technology publication TechRound to give expert commentary for Data Protection Day. Writing while at A&O IT Group, Sanjiv Cherian argued that organisations had largely addressed the obvious risks of remote working through tooling such as SD-WAN, virtual private networks and two-factor authentication, but had overlooked consumer Internet of Things and smart home devices sharing the same domestic wireless network. He characterised such devices, which typically ship without sustained patching regimes, as an effectively open entry point permitting low-skilled attackers to gain a foothold and then move laterally in search of corporate data, and called for stricter network segmentation policies and employee awareness where home and business traffic coexist.
Microminder Cyber Security
In January 2022, Sanjiv Cherian co-founded Microminder Cyber Security, established with investment from the group chairman of Micro Minder Ltd, a United Kingdom technology group with a corporate history extending over four decades. The venture was created to build a specialist cybersecurity consultancy addressing the requirements of regulated and infrastructure-heavy sectors.
Under Sanjiv Cherian's business leadership the firm expanded from its United Kingdom base into the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, with further expansion into India under consideration. Its service portfolio covers operational technology and industrial control system security, penetration testing, managed detection and response, security operations centre services, and compliance advisory against regional regulatory frameworks including those of the Dubai Electronic Security Center, the United Arab Emirates National Electronic Security Authority, the Saudi National Cybersecurity Authority and the Saudi Arabian Monetary Authority.
The company holds CREST certification and ISO 27001 accreditation. By 2026 it reported annual revenue in the multiple seven figures, with stated ambitions to reach eight figures during 2027. Sanjiv Cherian served as Chief Executive Officer before assuming the role of Chief Commercial Officer.
Thought leadership and public speaking
Sanjiv Cherian writes and speaks on cyber risk governance, operational technology exposure and the role of artificial intelligence in security operations. In February 2026 he was a speaker at OT Security First Abu Dhabi, the debut edition of an invitation-only industrial cybersecurity summit series convened by Events First Group and aligned to the Saudi National Cybersecurity Authority OTCC-1:2022 controls and the IEC 62443 standard. The edition brought together thirty-four speakers and more than one hundred and fifty industrial leaders, with contributions from the United Arab Emirates Cyber Security Council, Mubadala, ENOC, KNPC, DP World, Oman LNG and Yokogawa. Sanjiv Cherian appeared in the OT Security First track in his capacity as Chief Commercial Officer of Microminder Cyber Security.
In the same month he was quoted in an episode of the CISO Series podcast concerning the position of the chief information security officer, where he argued that security leaders are routinely made accountable for business risk without being granted corresponding decision-making authority, and characterised this imbalance as the most common and most dangerous tension in the profession.
He publishes Candid Cyber Conversations, a weekly LinkedIn newsletter covering operational technology, vendor risk, breach response and national infrastructure, which had passed twenty editions and more than three thousand two hundred subscribers by mid-2026. He also maintains a body of written commentary on silent cyber risk, the category of exposure that accumulates inside routine business processes, partnerships and decision structures rather than announcing itself through conventional security alerting.
Sanjiv Cherian develops and publishes work under the AI Synergist™ banner, a positioning concerned with the productive combination of human expertise and artificial intelligence in enterprise settings, including a framework for secure artificial intelligence transformation.
Personal life
Sanjiv Cherian is a British citizen and lives in Dubai, where he relocated from London in November 2024. He plays tennis regularly and an acoustic Guitar player.
References
TechRound, "Predictions for Data and Privacy in 2021: What The Experts Say", 1 February 2021
Events First Group, Speakers roster, OT Security First 2026
Events First Group, OT Security First series overview and Abu Dhabi 2026 edition
Microminder Cyber Security, About Us
Candid Cyber Conversations newsletter, LinkedIn
Sanjiv Cherian, official website
Sanjiv Cherian, LinkedIn profile
Sanjiv Cherian, published commentary on silent cyber risk