Meet the Team: Giuseppe Paterno

DeNexus has launched a series of ever-improving cyber models, which are aimed at helping industrial organizations, underwriters, reinsurers and ILS investors fully understand the real risks associated with cyber breaches - creating a level playing field for all the stakeholders.

Here are the people behind the technology working to develop credible modeling in order to quantify cyber risk and develop a cyber-ILS market.

1. What was your career journey that led you to joining DeNexus?

It has been a long, 30+ years journey into the IT industry. I have been passionate about computers since I was 7. I started contributing to my birth country's (Italy) telecommunication scene when I was 15. It was natural that this eventually became my job. I was lucky to work in big companies like IBM, Sun Microsystems, Oracle, RedHat, Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu), and all the big European Telcos and finance companies. With my contribution to OpenStack, and working for large companies, I eventually became one of the most famous systems & cloud architects for large-scale private cloud deployments in Europe. As part of the cloud transformation process, I am also acquainted with the necessary DevOps background to guide teams towards successfully adopting large-scale implementations. Security has been a passion since the beginning, so it played a prime part in all my architectures and deployments.

2. Where will you be based?

Where I am based is the most challenging question. Mainly in South London (UK). But I have family in Milan (Italy) and Innsbruck (Austria), where I usually spend quality time with them.

3. What is an average day in the life of a Distinguished System & Cloud Architect?

Most of the time I am meeting with members of different teams, or designing or re-designing architecture. Best practices are just on paper. As I wrote in my book “Learning from 100 Cloud Journeys”, embracing the cloud is a unique journey that requires a tailored approach. There is no recipe. It’s a matter of designing, trying, fixing, and seeing what works in that specific environment.

But I’m also somebody who likes a hands-on approach. I will never say no to putting my “hands on the keyboard” and helping my operations teammates. Learning from practical activities is a crucial part of being a successful architect. If you don’t, you don’t know what works and what doesn’t. 

4. How does your role fit into DeNexus’ mission to become the global standard of industrial cyber risk quantification for agencies, shareholders, investors, boards and risk transfer market?

Designing and operating a product such as DeRISK requires broad experience in many subjects. But first and foremost, security must be the top priority of the entire platform. With my background, I aim to contribute significantly to the product and lead DeNexus to be the most trusted and scalable platform on the market

5. What is the riskiest (PG/PG-13) thing you’ve ever done?

My life is quite boring. But people are always fascinated that I’m a pilot. It was a dream I’ve had since I was a kid, but it eventually became a reality in 2005--when I could finally afford it, and I started taking lessons. I am officially a private pilot on single engines airplanes, which means mostly Cessnas and Pipers. They are the most famous ones to the broader public. I took advantage of the Covid pandemic to expand my passion and gain new qualifications. I also fly seaplanes and learned to fly the Airbus 320, although I can’t legally fly it. I’m currently on the path to becoming a professional pilot. I hope to fly the DeNexus private plane if the company is aiming to get one!

For more information about the benefits of DeRISK v5, visit www.denexus.io/derisk-v5.