Meet the Seer: Samanta Venturini

Discover more about the people in our team and how they came to work in cybersecurity.

Sam joined our data analytics team in June 2021, who play a huge role in the success of Panaseer. Afterall, our product is fundamentally a data analytics platform.

What did you want to be growing up?

I am not sure, but I think I wanted to be a ballerina. To be honest, I didn’t really have an idea in mind of what I wanted to be. Throughout my career, I have always been lucky to find myself in the right place at the right time and met great mentors that helped me pursue my next career step.

What brought you to cybersecurity and Panaseer?

I completely changed my career when I joined Panaseer. I worked in the hospitality industry as a human resources manager for 11 years before that. I enjoyed helping people in growing and achieving their career goals and was passionate about creating a collaborative and positive working environment.

Progressing in my career as a human resources manager, I got more involved in cost control analysis – keeping retention rates high and reducing recruitment costs. This is when I started analysing data and using creative thinking to solve business challenges.

When the pandemic struck and the hospitality industry suddenly came to a halt, I took the time to further develop my skills in data analytics. I got back into study statistics and started learning how to code in SQL and Python. Up to that point, I was using Excel for my data analysis, but I could see the limit in querying large amounts of data and wanted to learn how to better manipulate a dataset. I was so enthusiastic about all the new things I learnt that a career detour just became natural.

That’s how I landed in data analytics. And Panaseer gave me the opportunity, welcoming me into the team in my first role as Data Analyst.

How do you describe your job to a layperson?

Normally I tend to give too much information! In the end I will just summarise it by explaining that our platform helps organisations understand their security posture and that the data analytics team contributes to it by analysing data on a specific subject and revealing insights.

A day in the life…

One of the projects we are working on now is to analyse customers’ engagement and how they interact with our product. Delivering a great customer experience means knowing your customer interactions with your product and our goal is to analyse that data and generate actionable insights that will bring us closer to our business goals.

What are you most proud of about your role at Panaseer?

I would say the team.  Everyone is friendly  and genuinely happy to help each other out at any time. Doesn’t matter how busy they are.

What non-cyber related skill has been the most valuable to you?

While we work for a cybersecurity company, when I joined, I didn’t have much cybersecurity knowledge. Data analytics is obviously crucial to my role. But there are also useful soft skills like being organised, being curious, and having the ability to self-learn.

One for fun: Any podcast recommendations?

They’re not cybersecurity related, but Simon Sinek and Adam Grant’s podcasts are good. They both focus on business, discussing things like organisation and an approach to teamwork, which can be helpful every day in the workplace.