Chief Security Officer.
Company Advisor. Board Member.
LOVE / Emerging tech, young companies, infrastructure as code, AI security and the future of the internet.
ALSO / Sunrise walks with my rescue pug mix, toddler beach days and buffalo wings
WHAT I DO
ADVISORY BOARD MEMBER
I am the CISO at Reco (Intelligent, heuristic-based SaaS security). I also advise executives on cloud security and go to market, from Fortune 100 banks to biotech start-ups. Current clients include a number of young companies including: expanso (storage and compute at the edge, with inherent security and privacy properties, based on open source protocol bacalhau), LISN (AI-driven CISO decision-making tools); Andesite (AI-driven tech to decrease manual processes and increase meaningful insights for security analysts) and Enkrypt AI (The only Enterprise AI Visibility and Security software tailored for AI-powered enterprises). Pro bono work serving on the Miami-Dade College BILT (business industry leadership team) and Black Girls Hack.
FORMER
Field CISO at Lacework, Deputy CISO at AWS, advisory board member to BalkanID (intelligent, fine-grained identity security and governance) and Security in all 3 branches of US Govt.
PREVIOUS ACADEMIC ROLES HELD
Penn State Law School, Pittsburgh, PA. Adjunct Professor and Fellow, Center for Computational and Data Sciences. (2020-21) / University of Maryland, Washington, DC. Adjunct Professor of Cybersecurity (2014-20) / University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA. Adjunct Professor of Cybersecurity. (2017-18) / Federal Communications Commission. Washington, DC. Lead Cyber Advisor. (2017 – 18)
ACADEMIC ARTICLES ON
Security, AI, robotics, SEC regulations, constitutional criminal issues online including CSAM (child sexual abuse material) and terrorist speech.
C.V. AT A GLANCE
EDUCATION / Harvard – JD, undergrad. WORK / CISO at Reco and advising young companies. WORK EXPERIENCE / AWS, Lacework and USG. EXPERTISE / Incloud, tech, security and investments. MEDIA / Quoted in WSJ, VentureBeat and many others.
MERRITT BAER
FEATURE ARTICLES
IN THE PRESS – FULL ARTICLES
AWS Security Profiles: Merritt Baer, Principal in OCISO (featured on Corey Quinn’s podcast)
Enterprise Level Security at Scale: Insights from AWS
Who is the Witness to an Internet Crime? The Confrontation Clause, Digital Forensics, and Child Pornography, 30 SANTA CLARA COMPUTER & HIGH TECH. L.J. 31 (2014)
Wall Street Journal: Materiality Seen as Tough Task in new SEC Cyber Rules, Aug 2, 2023; Cyber Experience on Boards Still Seen as Critical in New SEC Rules, July 27, 2023)
Teiss, Navigating Your First 30 Days as a CISO, Dec 18, 2023
SERVICES
HOW CAN I HELP?
ADVISOR / BOARD MEMBER
Go to Market / Introductions / Product validation / Product placement / Security trends / Threat landscape
SPEAKING ENGAGEMENTS
How to grow up your security shop / Security in the cloud / How CISOs make decisions / How to talk to CISOs if you are a vendor
Investor conversations
Market trends / Particular services / Something custom - feel free to ask!
WHAT'S CURRENTLY ON MY RADAR?
AI
We talk a lot about AI but don’t talk enough about the security of your AI.
VENDORS
Which vendors to choose: We talk a lot about features but we don’t talk enough about operationalizing the tech.
CLOUD
Security will feel different in the cloud. Let’s talk IaC, ephemerality, modularity, Serverless, managed services, architecture decisions, and formal reasoning.
