Kristen Smith 
- Starkel arrives from Tanium, where she led public sector marketing for nearly five years
- She held leadership roles at CrowdStrike, Micro Focus and Hewlett Packard Enterprise
- Elastic cleared FedRAMP High on AWS GovCloud in March
Elastic has named Kristin Starkel senior director of global public sector marketing, bringing in a cybersecurity marketing leader as the company builds out its federal business.
Starkel announced the move in a LinkedIn post Oct. 6. “What excites me most is the chance to think globally and build a public sector marketing strategy that connects a strong global vision with the unique needs of government customers and markets around the world,” she wrote.
Federal agencies continue to expand their use of commercial search and security platforms. The Potomac Officers Club will host the 2026 FedCiv Summit on Oct. 29 at the Ritz-Carlton Pentagon City in Arlington, Virginia, where government and industry leaders will discuss AI adoption, federal shared services, digital labor, interoperability and trusted information sharing. Register now.
What Experience Does Starkel Bring?
Starkel spent nearly five years at Tanium as senior director of public sector marketing, steering strategy across federal and state, local and education, or SLED, markets while managing a six-person team, according to her LinkedIn profile.
She previously served as senior manager of U.S. public sector marketing at CrowdStrike, directing go-to-market programs for government and healthcare sectors. Earlier, she spent three years at Micro Focus Government Solutions, rising from field and partner marketing manager to director of marketing, with responsibility for programs spanning the Department of War, the intelligence community, federal civilian agencies and SLED.
Her earlier career includes field marketing and global campaign roles at Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP. Starkel holds a degree from San Diego State University.
What Is Elastic Doing in the Federal Market?
Starkel joined a company that has spent the past year expanding its federal credentials. Elastic Cloud Hosted, a fully managed software-as-a-service offering, achieved Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program, or FedRAMP, High authorization on AWS GovCloud in March, clearing the platform for high-impact workloads and sensitive unclassified data, including controlled unclassified information. The company said the authorization covers security information and event management, threat detection and response, zero trust architecture work, large-scale logging and compliance programs, and mission search applications. Elastic Cloud Hosted achieved FedRAMP Moderate authorization on the same environment in 2020.
Elastic has expanded its federal partnerships over the past year. ECS won a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency contract in December to build a security information and event management-as-a-service platform, which ECS will design, host and operate with Elastic for federal civilian agencies. The contract has a $26 million base value and options totaling $130 million.
V2X partnered with Elastic in March to integrate Elasticsearch into government, defense and intelligence workflows. In August, Axonius launched a native integration pairing its asset inventory with Elastic Security to help agencies identify assets that should be generating logs under an Office of Management and Budget memorandum.
Elastic holds a volume-based discount agreement with the General Services Administration.
