Technology
Engineering Trust in the Age of Data: A Blueprint for Global Resilience
Global Banking & Finance Review®
Company
This profile is based on information provided by and interviews with Murali Natti and has not been independently verified by the publisher. The scenarios described are real; names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
This profile is based on information provided by and interviews with Murali Natti and has not been independently verified by the publisher. The scenarios described are real; names and identifying details have been changed to protect privacy.
Each swipe, tap, and click we execute conceals an implicit presumption: that the infrastructure supporting it will be seamless. We don't wonder if our purchase goes through, our medical history will load, or our savings will be secure. But in the background of this silent assurance is one of the biggest challenges of the digital age: making enormous bodies of information reliable, resilient, and secure.
For Murali Natti, this trust—often invisible—is more than an engineering challenge; it's his mission. While many see databases as rows of code and configuration files, he sees them as the invisible spine of modern life, supporting moments when reliability matters most.
Murali doesn’t build the flashy storefronts of apps. He’s the architect of the foundations, the plumbing, and the wiring. And after twenty years, he’s learned that the most critical code often isn’t written in a programming language but in the conversations, he has with the people who keep essential systems running.
He remembers the worn texture of a conference room chair as he sat across from David, an IT manager for a regional hospital. David was facing a mandatory system upgrade.
“We have to do it this weekend,” he said, rubbing his forehead. “If it fails, the new patient admittance system won’t talk to the records database. Saturday night in the ER, and we’re down. My team will be there with a case of Red Bull and a whole lot of prayer.”
That phrase stayed with Murali. It wasn’t a technical requirement; it was a human one. Instead of delivering only a migration plan, he focused on designing a safety mechanism. Late nights followed, diagrams filling his screen as he refined a system using logical replication—designed to maintain a near-real-time shadow of the database and enable rapid rollback if needed. The goal wasn’t to eliminate risk entirely but to ensure recovery could happen quickly and predictably.
Months later, standing beside David in the data center, the upgrade complete, Murali suggested a test.
“Let’s break it,” he said.
“On purpose?” David asked.
Murali nodded.
A simulated failure triggered alerts, then silenced. With a final command, the system reverted to its replicated state. The dashboard stabilized. David exhaled.
“It’s like it never happened,” he said softly.
For Murali, that interaction mattered more than recognition.
His career is shaped by similar moments. During a global retail migration—an “engine change mid-flight,” as he describes it—teams joined from San Jose, Bangalore, and London. At 3 a.m., Priya, an engineer in Bangalore, ran final checks.
“Replication lag is zero,” she said. “We’re green.”
The cutover proceeded. Minutes later, she added, her voice calmer now.
“It’s live. The dashboard looks stable.”
There were no fireworks—just quiet confirmation that millions of customers would shop that day without interruption. That, Murali believes, is the mark of good engineering.
His focus on systems is matched by his investment in people. He recalls working with Maria, a junior engineer stuck on a complex issue. Rather than providing an answer, he asked her to explain where the problem felt hardest. As she talked it through, the solution emerged on its own. The realization on her face stayed with him. It’s also why, as he has shared, he helped advocate for and support community events around open-source database technologies, creating spaces for engineers like Maria to present their own solutions.
That same pragmatism shapes his work with emerging tools like AI. Rather than abstract promises, Murali describes concrete use cases: disaster-response teams overwhelmed by fragmented information, supported by systems that analyze satellite data, sensor feeds, and public signals to help prioritize action. In his view, technology earns trust only when it performs under pressure.
The real impact of Natti’s work isn’t measured in terabytes or dashboards alone. It shows up in steadier operations, in teams that sleep better during upgrades, and in systems designed to recover gracefully rather than fail dramatically.
In a world racing toward the next breakthrough, Natti remains focused on something quieter and harder to achieve--trust. One carefully designed system at a time.
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