SoSafe, the vendor behind a leading human risk management platform has appointed Laura Ryan as its first Chief People Office. Ryan will lead the growing HR function within the developing organisation. The company is expanding internationally and now has offices in five European countries.
She will oversee the development of a best in class team managing a rapidly growing business. SoSafe states on its website that it has over 450 employees and it also has 92 open job positions. Ryan will manage the HR operations within the business, including people and talent, workspace and community, and operations. These act as an engine to accelerate the company’s mission and long-term vision to strengthen digital self-defence.
Dr Niklas Hellemann, CEO of SoSafe, said, “One of the pillars of our success is the excellence of our people – we are proud to have an outstanding team to drive our ambitious plans. Laura brings a wealth of experience in fast-paced, multi-cultural organisations and has proven her ability to build and lead people divisions in high-growth technology companies. I am very excited to have her join our management team and look forward to working with her to drive further growth for the business.”
Who is Laura Ryan
Ryan joins from Dropbox, where she was most recently Vice President of global HR Business Partnering. She spent nearly nine years at the file hosting service in senior HR roles. Before that, she spent five years at Google in leadership roles. She began her career at Aviva, spending seven years at the financial services vendor in HR roles, after graduating from the University of Galway.
Laura Ryan, Chief People Officer at SoSafe, commented, “Throughout my career, I’ve been passionate about scaling organisations, helping companies achieve this by fostering innovation and creating workplaces that inspire people to do their best work. SoSafe is working in an extremely interesting market with very strong dynamics: Cybercrime is the biggest threat to organisations, and SoSafe delivers a human-centric solution based on psychology. This gives the company and the team a very strong purpose and I am very excited to contribute to their mission to empower people facing digital threats.”
SoSafe continues to expand its leadership team
SoSafe has brought on board a significant number of senior leaders in 2024 already.
In February, it appointed Andrew Rose as its new Chief Security Officer (CSO). Rose joined from Proofpoint, where he was CISO for the last three and a half years.
Megan Brown joined in May as the Vice President of Global Partnerships. She brings over 15 years of sales experience. Most recently she was Head of Internal sales at LogicGate and also served in sales leadership roles at Checkster and CareerBuilder. She is leading SoSafe’s plans to expand its channel sales through international partnerships.
Gina Dragulin joined in April as Vice President of Product Marketing. She will ensure that SoSafe’s product innovations are brought to life and their customers get the highest value. Dragulin commented on LinkedIn, “Exciting new chapter begins as I join as VP of Product Marketing (at SoSafe), market leader in Human Risk Management.
“Blown away by the vision, in-depth know-how and appetite to drive meaningful change in the cybersecurity space, empower a positive security culture centred around employees as the first and last line of defense against cyber threats.”
Before SoSafe, she held senior marketing positions at Miro, Synthesised and Unbabel. She also spent nearly seven years at Microsoft.
Potentially, the most recent hire is Thomas Owen as Chief Information Security Officer. His LinkedIn pages still have him as Chief Information Security Officer at Grafana Labs (as of writing). An experienced security professional he spent six years at Memset in security leadership positions and also worked at Accenture and Rackspace in security roles. More recently, he was head of information, security and Risk at Snyk and CISO at Iloomi.
Enterprise Times
SoSafe appears to have built up its leadership team in time to cope with the influx of staff. It will be interesting to see how Ryan changes the organisational processes as the firm grows. Her experience in working within larger firms will come in useful.
While her role appears to be mainly internal, it will be interesting to see whether she also becomes a spokesperson for SoSafe tools amongst her peers. SoSafe is at the intersection of security, technology and HR, and Ryan could become a powerful asset.
