Mary Ann Davidson

Mary Ann Davidson is the chief security officer (CSO) at Oracle, responsible for Oracle software security assurance. She serves on the international board of the Information Systems Security Association (ISSA), has been named one of Information Security's top five "Women of Vision," is a Federal 100 Award recipient from Federal Computer Week, and was recently named to the ISSA Hall of Fame.

Shira Rubinoff: Could you start by talking about what you're doing now?

Mary Ann Davidson: I'm the chief security officer for Oracle Corporation. Specifically, my area of responsibility is what I would call secure engineering or assurance. My team makes sure that everything that we build, including hardware, software, and anything that goes out of our company with an Oracle label on it, is built securely and maintained securely.

I have wonderful colleagues who handle all the other areas of IT security and cloud security. I...