Sean Catlett appointed Chief Security Officer of Slack

Slack announced today the appointment of Sean Catlett as Slack’s Chief Security Officer. He will be responsible for protecting our organization and our customers’ data, ensuring that Slack is among the most secure and compliant channel-based messaging platforms for businesses and government agencies around the world.

Sean joins Slack from Reddit, where he served as Chief Information Security Officer. At Reddit, Sean built and grew the company’s dedicated Security and Privacy functions, protecting the site’s more than 430 million monthly active users around the world. In addition to a breadth of executive roles at industry-leading security software companies, Sean has held senior leadership roles securing some of the world’s largest financial institutions, including Fidelity Investments, Bank of America and Barclays. Sean holds five U.S. patents in machine learning in access governance, cybersecurity control framework development, data loss prevention, machine learning for intrusion detection, and e-crime detection.

“With the global shift to remote work, the threat landscape is evolving faster than ever before,” says Cal Henderson, Slack Chief Technology Officer and co-founder. “Our customers have complex and rigorous security needs, particularly those in the financial services, health care and government sectors. Sean’s leadership experience at financial services, consumer and enterprise companies, as well as his deep technical expertise, will make him an invaluable partner to our executive team and our customers.”

“Slack is at the forefront of the rapid acceleration of digital transformation,” says Sean. “This transition to a new, distributed workforce centered around a digital versus physical headquarters is an exciting opportunity to apply my experience leading teams responsible for protecting critical information in high-stakes environments. This will be critical as Slack continues to grow, and as our customers continue to scale their usage of Slack internally and with trusted partners through Slack Connect.”

Sean will join Slack in October, where he will lead all security governance, risk management, and compliance efforts. Slack’s industry-leading security program uses a defense-in-depth, risk-based security model with controls to manage the physical, technical and administrative risks of our operating environment. Our security program certifies its service with ISO 27001, ISO 27017, ISO 27018, SOC 2 Type 2, SOC 3, and Cloud Security Alliance. Slack also helps customers meet specific industry regulations and international security and data privacy standards, including FINRA, HIPAA, FedRAMP, data residency and GDPR.

About Slack:
Slack has transformed business communication. It’s the leading channel-based messaging platform, used by millions to align their teams, unify their systems, and drive their businesses forward. Only Slack offers a secure, enterprise-grade environment that can scale with the largest companies in the world. It is a new layer of the business technology stack where people can work together more effectively, connect all their other software tools and services, and find the information they need to do their best work. Slack is where work happens.