Fermín Serna Joins Databricks as Chief Security Officer
Former Citrix and Google security executive brings decades of deep technical knowledge to the high-growth pioneer of the data lakehouse
August 19, 2021
SAN FRANCISCO - August 19, 2021 - Databricks, the Data and AI company, today announced the appointment of longtime software executive and seasoned security chief, Fermín Serna, as the company’s new Chief Security Officer (CSO). Serna will lead Databricks’ high-impact network, platform and user security programs along with governance and compliance efforts as the company expands its platform capabilities and positions itself for the next phase of growth.
“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,” said Ali Ghodsi, CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks. “Fermín’s deep technical knowledge and impressive experience building and leading best-in-class security teams will prove invaluable for Databricks’ next chapter.”
Serna brings over 20 years of enterprise information security expertise to the Databricks leadership team and will oversee the expansion of the organization’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).
Prior to this, 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.
“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,” said Serna. “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.”
About Databricks
Databricks is the data and AI company. More than 5,000 organizations worldwide — including Comcast, Condé Nast, H&M, and over 40% of the Fortune 500 — rely on the Databricks Lakehouse Platform to unify their data, analytics and AI. Databricks is headquartered in San Francisco, with offices around the globe. Founded by the original creators of Delta Lake, Apache Spark™, and MLflow, Databricks is on a mission to help data teams solve the world’s toughest problems. To learn more, follow Databricks on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook.
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