F5 Networks announced the hire of Mike Convertino to lead its Information Security team. As the company's first Chief Information Security Officer (CISO), Convertino's first priority is the continued protection of company and customer assets and data. He will also play a lead role in the development of F5's security product roadmap and represent F5 in the IT industry and wider security community.

Convertino started on January 18 and is based in Seattle at F5's headquarters. Convertino brings to F5 nearly 30 years of experience in providing enterprise-level information security, cloud-grade information systems solutions, and advanced cyber capability development. His professional experience spans security leadership and product development at a wide array of organizations including the U.S. government, Fortune 500 companies, and security start-ups.

Prior to joining F5, Convertino was previously the Chief Information Security Officer at CrowdStrike, where he was responsible for the security of both CrowdStrike's corporate network and its product platform. He established the CrowdStrike Security Operations Center and developed new security technologies to meld the best of traditional IT security with the latest security in DevOps models for cloud environments. Before CrowdStrike, Convertino was the senior director of network security at Microsoft, where he was responsible for protecting the company's networks from intrusion and exploitation. In this role, he was responsible for leading a team of digital forensic professionals maintaining internal Microsoft security policies, as well as an extensive intrusion detection and security engineering team.