Paras Malhotra

Enterprise intelligence platform Starburst announced the appointment of Paras Malhotra as Chief Information Security Officer.

Data-platform companies sit in the blast radius of every customer's compliance program, which makes the CISO seat as much a sales-enablement role as a defensive one. Expect the role to carry heavy customer-facing trust obligations alongside internal security.

According to the release, Malhotra is responsible for product security, information security, and governance, risk and compliance across Starburst's on-premises and SaaS offerings. The release says he works closely with the product, go-to-market and engineering teams to strengthen the security posture of Starburst. According to the release, his work with those teams supports a growing Starburst focus on data and AI security as the company brings AI-native capabilities to enterprises. According to the release, Malhotra will help drive the company's strategy on customer trust, data protection, enterprise resilience and AI security.

Before Starburst, he was Senior Director of Information Security at Datadog, where he led its information security organization, according to the release. In that Datadog role, his work focused on continuous security monitoring, proactive risk management and customer trust to support growth in enterprise and commercial markets, the release says. The release says he also worked with engineering and product teams to scale AI governance, privacy, compliance and security operations programs for regulated industries. Earlier, Malhotra spent nearly a decade in senior security leadership roles at Amazon Web Services, among them Principal Manager for AWS Security Assurance, the release says. According to the release, at AWS he led the product roadmap and engineering strategy for security assurance initiatives across the AWS infrastructure. The release says he built automation and scalable tooling there to identify and remediate compliance and security risks proactively. According to the release, his teams at AWS developed systems that improved remediation workflows, risk assessment and vulnerability detection at enterprise scale.

Starburst describes its business as giving organizations governed, secure access to all of their data wherever it lives. According to the company, Starburst is built on open standards with Apache Iceberg and Trino and integrates with existing technologies.