New CISO appointments 2026. Jun 18, 2026 2 mins Keep up with news of CSO, CISO, and other senior security executive appointments. The upper ranks of corporate security are seeing a high rate of change as companies try to adapt to the evolving threat landscape. Many companies are hiring a chief security officer (CSO) or chief information security officer (CISO) for the first time to support a deeper commitment to information security. Follow this column to keep up with new appointments to senior-level security roles and perhaps gain a little insight into hiring trends. If you have an announcement of your own that you would like Csoonline to include here, contact Peter Sayer, executive editor of news, at [email protected]. New CISO appointments in june 2026. SolarWinds appoints Justin Henkel as CISO. IT management software vendor SolarWinds has named Justin Henkel its new CISO. Henkel was previously deputy CISO at OneTrust, and before that spent 25 years as an intelligence officer in the US Air Force. New CISO appointments in march 2026. Kathy Wang joints micro1 as CISO. Frontier AI model training company micro1 has hired Kathy Wang as CISO. She was most recently CISO at hospitality software developer Otelier, and has previously held top cybersecurity roles at Discord and GitLab. Green Impact Exchange names john Visneski CISO. John Visneski has joined stock exchange operator Green Impact Exchange as CISO. He was previously CISO at MGM Studios, and following that company's acquisition by Amazon became head fo security for mergers and acquisitions. His cybersecurity career began with the US Air Force, where he served as cyber advisor to the Secretary and Chief of Staff of teh Air Force. New CISO appointments in january 2026. Julien Mousqueton joins Cohesity as field CISO for Europe. Data security firm Cohesity has hired Julien Mousqueton as field CISO for Europe. His previous role was as CTO at IT service provider Computacenter. He is a reservist advisor for OFAC, the French national police force's anti-cybercrime division, and created the real-time ransomware activity-tracking platform ransomware.live. From its editors straight to your inbox. Get started by entering your email address below.

SolarWinds has appointed Justin Henkel as Chief Information Security Officer. Henkel brings over 20 years of experience spanning military and private sector roles, most recently serving nearly five years at OneTrust, where he advanced from Head of the CISO Center of Excellence to Deputy CISO. He served as an intelligence officer in the United States Air Force from 2001 to 2025 and held cybersecurity leadership positions at CME Group and iSIGHT Partners. His expertise includes cyber threat intelligence, vulnerability management, and enterprise risk. He holds a Master's in Intelligence Studies and an Executive Certificate in Technology and Operations from MIT Sloan School of Management. SolarWinds provides observability and IT management software for hybrid network environments.

Accelerate query performance with AI Query Assist: intelligent tuning, built securely. In this post, Owen Murphy breaks down AI Query Assist, explaining how it combines execution plans with generative AI to rewrite slow SQL. SolarWinds look at why AI Query Assist matters for DBAs and developers who want faster, more reliable performance tuning without sacrificing security. April 2, 2026 Page Contents The most daunting screen in a DBA's life isn't a red dashboard; it's the blank cursor blinking inside a query editor. You've identified the bottleneck. You know the query is performing a massive table scan where it should be seeking. Now you face the tedious, manual reality of remediation: rewriting the SQL, checking syntax, verifying logic, and ensuring you haven't introduced a regression. In the past year, the temptation to paste a slow query into a public large language model (LLM) has grown. For a seasoned DBA, that's an obvious nonstarter. But for a full-stack developer or a systems engineer trying to push a release, security implications aren't always at the front of mind. They might not realize that pasting proprietary schema or customer personally identifiable information (PII) into a public chatbot is a massive compliance risk. The results are also often erratic because the LLM lacks context. It sees the text, but it doesn't understand the cost. That's why SolarWinds is announcing the general availability of AI Query Assist - an intelligent tuning advisor that combines generative AI with your database execution plans. This isn't a generic text generator. It's a purpose-built engine designed to automate the rewrite phase of query tuning, anchored by two nonnegotiable pillars: context and security. AI Query Assist is generally available now for: * SolarWinds(R) SQL Sentry(R)(SQL Server) * SolarWinds(R) Database Performance Analyzer (DPA) (SQL Server and Oracle) * SolarWinds(R) Database Observability SaaS (SQL Server) The "elephant in the room": security and architecture. Let's address the immediate concern: "Where is my data going?" At SolarWinds, SolarWinds know data sovereignty is nonnegotiable. That's why AI Query Assist is architected to ensure your database contents remain yours. * Sanitized Payloads: Before any data leaves your environment, AI Query Assist identifies and masks PII and sensitive literals - the service receives the structural logic of the query, not your customer data * Platform Connect: For its on-premises users (SQL Sentry and DPA), SolarWinds utilize Platform Connect, which acts as a secure tunnel, bridging your on-prem instances to the AI service without requiring you to move the database itself or open risky firewall ports Why do generic LLMs fail at SQL tuning? Because they treat SQL as prose and guess based on syntax patterns. AI Query Assist is different. It not only reads the SQL text but also analyzes the Explain Plan. By ingesting the plan, the engine understands the actual execution strategy, including cardinality estimates, join types, and index usage. This moves the output from guesswork to engineering. It allows the tool to suggest heuristics-based improvements that are mathematically likely to reduce latency, rather than just syntactically different. How it works: from detection to remediation. SolarWinds has designed the workflow to mirror the way a typical DBA thinks, taking you from a high-wait state to a deployed fix in three steps: * Select: You identify the problematic query within DPA, SQL Sentry, or SolarWinds Observability SaaS * Sanitize and Analyze: Upon submission, the tool masks the data and bundles the SQL text with its specific Explain Plan * Optimize: The engine generates a rewritten query focused on performance efficiency Crucially, this isn't a "black box." SolarWinds provide a Thinking tab that details exactly why the AI suggests a change, whether it's converting a subquery to a JOIN, adding a missing predicate, or forcing a specific index. Once the recommendation is ready, you can review the Original SQL and the Optimized SQL side by side. Who is this for? * For the DBA: This serves as a sanity check, handling the rote work of rewriting complex T-SQL and allowing you to focus on architectural issues - it acts as a deterministic second opinion, validating your tuning strategy against the plan data * For the Developer: SQL performance is a deep well, and AI Query Assist helps you learn complex patterns faster - by reading the Explanation tab, you gain insight into why your -generated query was slow and how to write it better next time Augmented, not replaced. SolarWinds believe in augmented intelligence. The goal of AI Query Assist isn't to replace the DBA but to accelerate the mean time to rewrite. SolarWinds handle the syntax and the initial optimization logic so you can make the final engineering decision. Stop staring at the blank cursor. Resources. * SQL Sentry AI Query Assist: A walkthrough of how AI Query Assist works in SQL Sentry. * DPA AI Query Assist: A setup and workflow guide for using AI Query Assist in DPA. * THWACK: The SolarWinds community hub for product updates, discussions, and feedback. AI Query Assist FAQ. 1. What Is AI Query Assist? AI Query Assist is a SolarWinds capability that uses generative AI plus execution plan context to suggest performance-focused SQL rewrites. 2. Why Not Use A Public AI Tool? Public AI tools can lack execution context and may expose sensitive query details. AI Query Assist is built into your SolarWinds workflow and designed for database tuning. 3. How Does AI Query Assist Work? You select a slow query, submit it for analysis, and review an optimized version side by side with the original, along with a clear explanation of the suggested changes. 4. Where Is AI Query Assist Available? AI Query Assist is available for SQL Sentry, Database Performance Analyzer (DPA), and SolarWinds Observability SaaS. 5. Does It Replace Manual Query Tuning? No. It speeds up the rewrite phase, but you still review, test, and decide whether to deploy the suggested SQL.