Flipping the Switch to Serverless: How McAfee Modernized Its Infrastructure and Halved Compute Costs

At McAfee, we empowered 1,000+ end users and transformed our data platform — migrating over a third of production workloads to Databricks Serverless and unifying governance with Unity Catalog. Serverless compute put self-service analytics directly in users' hands, driving a 34% jump in monthly active users, a 30%+ lift in job efficiency, and $400K+ in projected annual savings — all delivered by a lean platform team. Our phased, data-driven migration playbook made adoption safe and reversible, using decision dashboards and clear revert-to-classic paths. To date, we've hit 65% infrastructure modernization — 90% of warehouses and 40% of jobs on Serverless.

In this session, we'll share how we governed workloads with Unity Catalog, selected high-impact migration candidates, overcame serverless limitations, and built the dashboards and tagging strategies that earned executive confidence. Attendees will leave with a proven blueprint to scale serverless adoption and unlock real value — increased velocity and reduced costs.