Mario Duarte

Mario Duarte is Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) of Aembit, appointed in October 2024.

Career path

Duarte began his cybersecurity career in red teaming before expanding into both technical and leadership roles on the defensive side. He went on to hold senior security roles at GoGrid, Moody's KMV and Ross Stores, with experience spanning the finance, health care, retail and technology sectors. Duarte then spent nearly a decade at Snowflake, where he helped shape and lead the data cloud company's security program and rose to vice president of security. In that role he oversaw compliance initiatives covering FedRAMP, HIPAA/HITECH and PCI standards for the organization. In October 2024, Aembit, described as the non-human IAM company, announced his appointment as CISO. "I fell in love with security because of the thrill of finding weaknesses and fixing them," Duarte said.

Remit at Aembit

In the CISO role, Duarte is focused on advancing Aembit's efforts to secure non-human identities, such as workloads and service accounts, as organizations shift to cloud-native, distributed and automated environments. Aembit describes itself as a provider of workload identity and access management solutions that secure applications, AI agents and service accounts across on-premises, SaaS, cloud and partner environments. Its Workload IAM Platform was named runner-up in the 2024 RSA Innovation Sandbox competition.

Published work

While at Snowflake, Duarte wrote Predictions: The Cybersecurity Challenges of AI, published in December 2023, and How Snowflake Delivers on the National Cybersecurity Strategy, published in March 2023. After joining Aembit, he wrote Why I Came Out of (Pseudo) Retirement to Help Solve the Non-Human Identity Challenge as Aembit's CISO, published in October 2024. Across his writing, Duarte has drawn on more than two decades of experience as a security professional working in the retail, health care and financial sectors.