Bridget Guerrero, Senior Manager, Global Security Resilience at GoDaddy, will tell you that her career path has been circuitous. In many ways, that’s true, but there are two underlying themes that have been present throughout all of the stops on her professional journey thus far: contribution and protection.
In the beginning, her journey was clear and direct. Right out of college, Guerrero joined the Marine Corps, focusing on security and intelligence, vulnerability and threat reduction. Shortly after September 11, 2001, Guerrero left the military, but found her way back to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security as a senior intelligence analyst focused on emerging threat analysis.
Then, a few years later, Guerrero made a turn, leading humanitarian operations and refugee settlement operations for asylum seekers in Romania and Turkey. “I think of that as some of the most meaningful work I’ve done in my life,” she says.
When Guerrero came back to the U.S., she entered the corporate security world, first founding her own private security firm and later moving to positions at Microsoft and then GoDaddy. “It’s really important to jump off track from time to time and take opportunities to help you grow; they always contribute to your success later, even if they are not directly related to a conventional career path,” Guerrero says.
At GoDaddy, Guerrero has been a critical partner in helping the company build a safety, security and resilience program. She has led the company’s response efforts and helped provide critical and timely support through several natural disasters and globally disruptive events, including COVID-19, the Russia-Ukraine conflict, and others.
“The most important thing I am doing right now is building a security resilience framework and program, taking into account how global events impact life safety, asset protection and business reputation and helping the business sustain those hits and return to business quicker and even better than before,” she says.
Over the years, Guerrero has worn a number of hats and contributed to a wide variety of areas within GoDaddy’s safety and security function. She has been entrusted with some of the largest and most important corporate security projects at the organization, including the transformation of the company’s control room to an intelligence-focused global security operations center (GSOC).
She is also the product owner of the company’s critical event management platform and has built a program around the platform to extract significant value not only for the safety and security function, but for the enterprise’s resiliency efforts as well.
And proving value within the company and security industry as a whole is something that Guerrero keeps top of mind at all times. “I love the uncertainty of security and the continual growth opportunities, but the most satisfying aspect of my job is knowing we are providing real value to GoDaddy,” she says.
A few years ago, Guerrero and the security team took a hard look at the “customer threat” topic, seeking to take a proactive approach to mitigation. “We support 21 million customers, and we realized that we had 6,000 customer service reps who could serve as risk and threat reporters,” she says. So, the team built a process for customer support agents to report threatening information to security, allowing the team to assess, contain, deescalate or mitigate incidents or potential incidents quickly.
Guerrero says the program has been so successful that they’ve used it as a model to expand risk mitigation and workplace violence mitigation to the larger enterprise. “We took that use case and evaluated how successful it was; we realized that the same processes and procedures served to mitigate reputational issues and crisis issues, and we realized we could expand to enterprise risk mitigation,” she says.
Outside of the day-to-day, Guerrero brings her drive to contribute and her passion to prove value to a number of organizations and associations, including as Chair of OSAC’s Women in Security group, active member of the Women in Security & Resilience Alliance and the Association of Continuity Professionals, and as a volunteer for her children’s sports teams. “I think it’s important to give back and be actively engaged if you want to make things better,” Guerrero says.
For future generations, particularly future generations of working women, Guerrero believes her role is to use her voice to educate others on career possibilities, the industry, and allow them to see successful women in leadership positions that they would one day aspire to. “That’s one of the reasons I’m involved in OSAC,” she says. “Our mission is to amplify the voices of other women in the security industry doing great things. A secondary objective is to provide mentorship for young or new professionals so they can see themselves in leadership positions as they grow. It’s important for new professionals coming into this field to see that in today’s world, their skillset, their position and their path could lead them to a chief security officer position, a leadership position or whatever role they want to pursue.”
