Junaid Khalid

I work where cybersecurity, compliance and AI meet. Most teams I talk to want AI on their own documents and inboxes, and the questions that stop them are security questions: where does the data go, who can see it, and what will the auditor ask. Today I am the face of Locul, a product of Ertiqah LLC in the USA, and those questions are what I write about on this blog.

From January 2022 to June 2024 I was Presales Lead for EMEA and APAC at GFI Software, consulting across its whole security and networking line: Kerio Control firewalls, GFI MailEssentials email security, GFI Archiver for email and file archiving, GFI LanGuard patch and vulnerability management, Kerio Connect email server and Exinda bandwidth management. I authored GFI's detailed ISO 27001 guide and worked on its NIST, EU AI Act and GDPR content.

Most of that work was with highly regulated organisations, where data retention, audit trails and access control are not optional: government and defence, aviation, banking and large IT services firms. I worked on cybersecurity and compliance engagements with NASA, the British Ministry of Defence, Saudi Arabian Airlines, Banco Afirme, Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), ran webinars for buyers across EMEA and APAC, and trained 50+ channel partners in those regions.

My AI background came first. I was an AI research intern at the TUKL-NUST R&D Center in Islamabad, working on speech (speaker segmentation, audio cleaning and speech to text), and held an AI research fellowship at the University of Insubria in Italy on multi-modal models. At Ingenio EC, a South American startup, I was Head of Artificial Intelligence and then CTO, leading 15+ engineers across AI, web and mobile.

I studied Software Engineering at NUST in Islamabad (BSc, 2020). On this blog I cover how to run AI privately: keeping data in your region, what a memory layer should and should not store, and how to get an AI rollout through a security review.