Margarita Rivera Delivers Happiness—and Safety—at Carnival

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Now as the global chief information security officer (CISO)  at Carnival Corporation, Margarita Rivera is tasked with, among many, many other responsibilities, technologically securing “floating cities” transporting cruise-loving passengers all over the world.

In just over eighteen months since coming to Carnival Corporation, Rivera has transitioned from leading brand information security to overseeing security enterprise-wide as a global CISO. The move brought her home—finally, she jokes—to Miami and is a dream-come-true, combining her own love of “cruising” with the opportunity to impact a highly complex, global business.

“It’s hard not to get a little teary thinking back on the last eighteen months,” she says. “I’m a Miami native. It’s so good to be in the 305. And I am so grateful to have the opportunity to make a meaningful difference here.”

Unlike her previous roles in financial services, real estate, and retail, Carnival Corporation’s ecosystem spans multiple verticals on every single ship: hotels, restaurants, healthcare, payments, guest Wi‑Fi, marine and operational technology, and shoreside corporate environments. Each vessel must be secured from the shore to the ship, protecting both information assets and what she calls “cyber safety” for guests and crew.

What has surprised her most is not the complexity but how much she enjoys orchestrating security across eight cruise lines, each with its own technology footprint, guest profile, and region.

“It’s one thing to secure one company with one tech stack,” Rivera explains. “It’s another thing to secure one company with multiple tech stacks.” That challenge has pushed her to become more creative and more strategic than ever.

Most people know the Carnival Cruise Line name but don’t realize the corporation operates multiple cruise lines under one umbrella, all with different needs and priorities. As a single global CISO serving all of them, Rivera has had to evolve from being a hands-on security leader to a deeply strategic executive, balancing standardization with as-needed support.

Rivera’s security organization is global and centralized, but it supports brands that may have distinct technology stacks, regulatory landscapes, and guest expectations. That reality has expanded her creativity, she says, because she must think beyond a one-size-fits-all playbook and design controls, architectures, and risk decisions that work across multiple environments.

Her mission as part of a larger team is to “deliver happiness for a living,” making vacations not just unforgettable but also safe, so every security decision is filtered through its potential impact on guest experience.

Behind the scenes, Rivera and her team are incredibly interested in how artificial intelligence will continue to offer new possibilities and new challenges, in how they serve customers and secure their organization.

Rivera is deliberately putting herself back in learner mode to keep up with the exponential progress of AI. She understood how to secure AI systems, but realized that to truly guide her organization, she needed to understand how AI is built, so she went back to school, studying AI in depth, and has spent some long nights building applications and agents herself.

She sees AI as a positive disruptor, not a threat, but stresses that organizations cannot run and deploy AI without fixing foundational issues like data quality, governance, and access management. In her view, clean, well-governed data is nonnegotiable if companies want to leverage AI to its full capacity.

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Having spent the bulk of her career as one of the few women, let alone Latinas, in the room, Rivera says Carnival has been a refreshing change. She has the chance to interact with other people who have similar lived experiences, and it’s made her more conscious than ever of how important that experience can be for others just beginning their careers.

“Opportunities to take on this role are so incredibly important to me because I want to show other people that this is possible,” Rivera says. “I want to pave the way for other women and other Latinas in tech and cybersecurity.”

Rivera says that her own success came with heavy expectations she put on herself. She wanted to be smarter, faster, and more on-the-ball than her counterparts. And she took relationship-building very, very seriously. That’s why, to this day, she can forge connections with just about anyone.

“Working with Margarita Rivera has been a great learning experience,” says Pankaj Tagra, chief global officer and global head of mobility at HCLTech. “As a CISO, she brings strong technical leadership and a sharp business vision, enabling direction, clarity and purpose. She ensures cybersecurity is embedded as a foundational design element of the enterprise.”

The CISO credits her undergrad business degree, one she initially doubted herself for getting, as a huge driver in her efficacy inside a business. She doesn’t inherently approach every problem as a technologist, even though she has a Master’s in Information Systems from Harvard University. She’s able to approach it from multiple angles, both business and technical and understand, not just tolerate, the business’s needs.

“It’s one thing to secure one company with one tech stack. It’s another thing to secure one company with multiple tech stacks.”

Margarita Rivera

And Rivera might understand Carnival Corporation a bit more than most. She’s been an adamant cruiser for at least twenty-five years. Advice for first-time and long-time cruisers alike? She was well-prepared for that question.

“Buy the drink package,” Rivera says, laughing. “And pre-pay as much as you can upfront. Book your excursions and specialty restaurant. Then your only concern is having a wonderful time.”

You might just catch Carnival Corporation’s CISO on her annual New Year’s cruise with her family.

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