Omar Khawaja

Omar Khawaja is passionate about people, community, frameworks, communication and measurement. Omar is currently VP, Field CISO at Databricks. In the past, he was Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of $26B Highmark Health as it grew YoY by $1.5B for 9 years. Prior to Highmark Health, Omar was at Verizon Enterprise Solutions, where he had product management and marketing responsibilities for their security solutions portfolio with customers in 72 countries.

To sustain the effective delivery of cyber risk mitigation at scale, Omar led the development and execution of 14 frameworks and 8 measurement programs. For this focus on resilience and scalability, he has been profiled by: Wall Street Journal, SANS, Forrester, Gartner, NACD, Reuters, HIMSS, CSO Magazine, CMU, and others.

Omar has a BS in Electrical Engineering from Georgia Tech and an MBA from University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business. Omar currently serves on the boards of HITRUST, The FAIR Institute and Leadership Pittsburgh; he also serves as an advisor to a half dozen tech firms, and as faculty for the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) program at Carnegie Mellon University.

Omar’s certifications include SAFe Agilist, human centered design practitioner, CPHIMS (Certified Professional in Healthcare Information and Management Systems), CISSP (Certified Information Systems Security Professional), CCSK (Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge), and FAIR Risk.