Season 4 Episode 5: A Day in the Life: Senior Security Assurance & Advisor Sailakshmi Santhanakrishnan (Sai)

01/24/23 • 33 min

In this episode, Rachel sits down with Sai and they speak about Sai's journey from being a technologist, to challenging herself in various roles and responsibilities in Governance Risk and Compliance and later moving to the C-suite. Sai shares her insights with others about career development, and how to be an advocate and mentor to others.

HOST:
Luyao (Rachel) Chen is a Senior Manager with Schellman & Company based in Austin, TX, specializing in managing and conducting examinations and compliance engagements including SOC 1, SOC 2 SOC 3, HIPPA, and ISO 27001. Luyao has worked with organizations ranging from start‐ups to fortune 500 companies across various industries including technology, energy, cloud services, communications, healthcare, legal and financial services.
GUEST SPEAKER:
Sailakshmi Santhanakrishnan ( Sai) is Professional Services – Senior Security Assurance & Advisor for AWS. She is collaborative, result driven cloud risk, compliance and security executive who has enabled Fortune 100 & 500 organizations to successfully deliver highly visible and significant regulatory, compliance and technology initiatives.
As a trusted advisor, her core strengths are in partnering with the C-suite and business segments to enable their cloud adoption journey to build resilient and regulatory-compliant organizations in the Cloud.
Sai enjoys global travel and learning about cultural variances. Sai is involved in her community as a NextGen advisor, volunteer, and mentor and as a guest faculty University of Texas, Dallas.

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Previous Episode

Season 4 Episode 4: A Day in the Life: Cybersecurity Expert, Co-Founder and CEO, Ashwini Rao

In this episode, Preeti conducts an engaging interview with Ashwini Rao, the co-founder and CEO of Eydle. Throughout their conversation, Ashwini talks about her career in cybersecurity, as well as the impact of her findings within the field. We hope that you will enjoy it and thank you so much for listening!
Guest - Ashwini Rao
Ashwini Rao, PhD is a cybersecurity expert, and Cofounder and CEO of Eydle, a startup that protects people and brands from impersonation scams on social media. Previously, she was the CISO at Spring Labs. She has also worked at companies such as Qualcomm and Appian. Her research has been recognized by the Federal Trade Commission, has been used to support a seminal privacy-related case in the US Supreme Court, and has been cited in the Big Data and Privacy report by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology. Her research has been covered by the popular press including NPR, Scientific American and New Scientist.
Host - Preeti Ravindra
Preeti solves security problems with data and math with industry experience working at the intersection of security and AI. She has experience developing and operationalizing machine learning key differentiator solutions to solve cybersecurity problems in security operations, vulnerability management and endpoint protection. Her unique value proposition is working cross-functionally to help security teams succeed in adopting data science and machine learning to deliver business value. She gives back to the cybersecurity community by sharing her work at conferences and supporting women in cybersecurity through podcasting.
Preeti has a Master's degree in Information Networking with a Cybersecurity concentration from Carnegie Mellon University. She has held different roles such as Security Researcher, Applied Researcher, Machine Learning Engineer and Data Scientist. Currently, she is an Information Security Manager at BetterUp leading the security insights and automation team operating at the intersection of security and data science, helping all security teams understand, prioritize and action on their security gaps and risks in a data-driven way.

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Season 4 Episode 6 - A Day in the Life: Data Protection and Privacy, Diane Tran

In this episode, Aparna Kadari speaks with Diane Tran about her role in the Data Protection Space. Diane shares the challenges organizations face to protect data in this Global age, the support system she has had in her family and how she continues to be a trailblazer supporting women in the Information Security space. She encourages women to hone their craft and create work life harmony in all areas of their lives. Please enjoy.
HOST:
Aparna Kadari is an Information Security Director for Operations, Endpoint Security, and Cloud Protection Engineering teams at Fannie Mae. She has an MBA with a double major in Pharmaceutical and Chemical Management from Fairleigh Dickinson University, and a minor in International Business from Wroxton College, Oxfordshire, UK. She is an avid Cyber Security speaker and an active blogger. She also writes poetry and has four anthologies published to her credit.
She continues to be a mentor at the Girls in Technology (GIT) and Women in Technology (WIT); served as Vice-Chair for the WIT Mentor - Protege program, and as the ATA Convention Women's Forum Chair. She has been involved with community give-back organizations like ASCEND ( a Pan-Asian Leadership group), Executive Women's Forum, developed online awareness campaigns such as STOP Elder Abuse (SEA), continues to advocate for equity for women in STEM and meritocracy in our education system.
SPEAKER:
Diane Tran is an innovative leader with a unique background consisting of cross-disciplinary skills and experience in Data Protection and Privacy, Information Security and Information Technology.
As a leader, she strives for continuous improvement while leading high-performance teams in diverse and dynamic environments. She currently leads the Data Protection program with a big focus on Data Loss Prevention. The program’s objective is to ensure data is well protected while supporting regulatory mandates and business priorities. It includes the development and implementation of enterprise-wide data management policies, control & governance frameworks, and technical capabilities.

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