Baer brings more than 15 years of cybersecurity experience driving security & governance initiatives in all three branches of the US government and the private sector
Reco, the leading provider of identity-centric SaaS Security, has expanded its leadership team and added Merritt Baer as the company’s first chief information security officer. With more than 15 years of cybersecurity experience, Baer will secure Reco infrastructure, provide security expertise to Reco customers, and thought leadership to the broader security community.
“When I was in the Office of the CISO at AWS, I saw these pain points for customers,” Baer said. “It’s not good enough to tell folks that they need to configure and monitor their own resources in an elegant way—what I hear from fellow CISOs is that they took for granted that this is a problem but assumed they would have to build a solution themselves. I’m a security practitioner that knows the business, and I believe that SaaS Security will become a line item on all CISO budgets. Reco is a company that is going to take off.”
“From my first conversation with the Reco team, I knew I’d found a company with limitless growth potential that solves a gap in the market,” said Baer. “Today, individuals and companies are interacting with a huge number of apps. We’re talking about thousands, often tens of thousands, of apps. I love the freedom of offering employees the opportunity to work in an unconstrained environment, but the security team needs to be able to secure that access in an ongoing way. And to do that, you need to leverage tech to get a handle on that and make it attestable. The Reco SaaS security solution does that.”
Prior to joining Reco, Merritt Baer served in the Office of the CISO at Amazon Web Services for over five years—a Deputy CISO to help secure AWS infrastructure, at a vast scale. She also served as Field CISO at Lacework, where, based on SEC requirements to report material cyber incidents, Merritt developed a framework for CISOs on what makes a “material” incident, which the Wall Street Journal has cited numerous times. Prior to her work in the private sector, Merritt served as Lead Cyber Advisor to the Federal Communications Commission. She has also served at the US Department of Homeland Security, the Office of US Senator Michael Bennet, and the US Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces. In addition to her work as a CISO at Reco, Merritt is an advisor to a handful of young companies where she mentors executives on cloud, AI, security, go-to-market, and how CISOs make decisions.
“Merritt is a CISO’s CISO. She not only understands how to approach these challenges internally, she knows how critical SaaS security is for CISOs because she is one,” said Ofer Klein, co-founder and CEO at Reco. “The modern CISO is one that understands how to build strong security programs, how to navigate business imperatives, and how to meet legal and regulatory requirements. Reco’s rapid growth trajectory requires us to mature our information security operations as we seek to safeguard our organization’s digital assets and ensure operational resilience. With her record of building outstanding cybersecurity functions that deliver effectiveness, efficiency, and compliance, Merritt’s background and experience make her the perfect choice for this vital role.”
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