Flipping the Switch to Serverless: How McAfee Modernized ~40% of Its Infra and Halved Compute Costs

At McAfee, we transformed our data platform by migrating over a third of production workloads to Databricks Serverless and empowering 1,000+ end users through SQL Serverless while unifying governance with Unity Catalog. This shift cut idle cluster overhead, delivered $350K in projected annual savings and drove a 34% increase in active monthly users—all with a lean platform team. Our phased, data-driven migration playbook made adoption safe, reversible and repeatable, using decision dashboards and clear revert-to-classic paths to de-risk modernization. So far, we’ve achieved 39% infrastructure modernization—moving 90% of warehouses and 40% of jobs to SQL Serverless. In this session, we’ll share how we governed workloads with Unity Catalog, selected high-impact migration candidates, overcame serverless limitations, and built dashboards and tagging strategies that earned executive confidence. Attendees will leave with a proven blueprint to scale serverless adoption confidently across their own organizations.