Databricks appoints Fermin Serna as new CSO

Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the appointment of software executive and security chief, Fermín Serna, as the company's new Chief Security Officer (CSO). Serna will lead Databricks' high-impact network, platform and user security programmes along with governance and compliance efforts as the company expands its platform capabilities and positions itself for the next phase of growth.

Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, said: "For Databricks and our customers across the globe, security is paramount and I am thrilled to welcome Fermín to the team as our Chief Security Officer. Fermín's deep technical knowledge and impressive experience building and leading best-in-class security teams will prove invaluable for Databricks' next chapter."

Serna has over 20 years of enterprise information security expertise. By joining the Databricks leadership team he will oversee the expansion of the organisation's mission-critical cybersecurity organization. He joins Databricks from Citrix, where he most recently led a robust global security and data privacy practice as the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO).

Before joining Databricks, Serna also served as the Head of Product Security at Google. In this role, he led the team responsible for Google Product Security and worked closely with external technology partners to build highly secure APIs, development libraries and containment frameworks to ensure Google security standards were met at every turn of the product lifecycle.

During his tenure at Google, he worked to establish and implement security review practices and also oversaw the vulnerability response and risk mitigation protocols for several product groups. Serna has also held senior security roles at Microsoft and was previously the CSO for Semmle (acquired by GitHub), where he established and led the security research and vulnerability response teams. He brings vast experience of the industry to the Databricks portfolio.

Serna said: "Databricks is at the forefront of data and AI innovation as it pioneers the new lakehouse category and I am incredibly excited to join the leadership team during such a pivotal time. I look forward to working with customers, partners and the world-class Databricks security team as we bring the company and product vision to new heights."

The Databricks Lakehouse Platform unifies data, analytics and AI. With Lake House architecture, customers can store data in a data lake and use a ring of purpose-built data services around the lake allowing them to make decisions with speed and agility, at a scale and price/performance that is unmatched in the market. A data lake is a centralised, curated, and secured repository that stores all your data, both in its original form and prepared for analysis.