End Users '20 under 40' 2017—Dan Sadler

Dan Sadler, 37

Director - Security Shared Services, Exelon Corp.

Baltimore

Dan Sadler said he feels lucky to have spent his entire career at Exelon Corp., the largest energy company in the U.S. measured by utility customers served.

“My professional security career started with an internship during my senior year of college and I have held several leadership positions at Exelon over the past 16 years,” he said. “I started in the business continuity team, focusing on emergency planning and crisis management, and I excelled there and ultimately became the manager.”

Sadler also served as the senior manager for cybersecurity operations and served as director of security operations before moving into his current role where he “oversees our security strategy functions,” he explained, including “security risk management, budget, projects, controls assurance, identity and access management, supply chain risk, and merger integration functions.”

He also has served on the governor's emergency management advisory council of Maryland and co-founded and served as president of the Association of Contingency Planners chapter in Maryland.

Sadler said he takes a very centralized approach to security. “We are responsible for protecting the grid for some of the most critical and highly populated areas in the country. So we aim to mitigate the evolving threats with our skilled personnel and our security capabilities, while keeping up with organizational growth and regional scale.”

Although physical security is a constant challenge, cybersecurity is a major emphasis for the company and energy sector.

“There is no silver bullet but we feel we are leaning forward with our capabilities and our broader team,” he noted. “But cyber threats are changing every day and the malicious actors out there are using more complex tools.”

In terms of emerging technology, Sadler is excited about “big data solutions on both the physical and cyber side that have analytic and real-time alerting capability, so you build certain use cases around physical and logical behavior.”