Professional Experience

Principal Solutions Architect

Arcus Consulting LLC, October 2022 – Present

Principal solutions architect of networking and cybersecurity solutions that allow organizations to focus on what they do rather than worrying about their IT infrastructure.

Establish and maintain vendor and distributor partnerships, achieving Cisco Premier Integrator – Small Business Specialization
Analyze and evaluate clients’ networking and security infrastructure to determine current state, identify potential issues and deficiencies, and make remediations based on current standards and frameworks from CIS, NIST, and PCI-DSS
Establish monitoring systems for client infrastructure and systems using a variety of commercial off the shelf, open source, and internally developed tools and applications
Assist clients with governance, risk, and compliance through written IT policies and procedures, business continuity and disaster recovery plans

Solutions Architect
Enterprise Communications

West Technology Group, January 2015 – August 2023

Senior architect leading an eight member team for new project delivery, implementation processes, and platform improvements. Served as the subject-matter expert through the full sales and product delivery life cycles. Mentored junior team members and interns.

Managed global project to migrate over 2000 customer server platforms and critical services across eight data centers located in North America (4), EMEA (2), and APAC (2) to new Cisco UCS and VMWare ESX infrastructure with minimal customer facing downtime.
- Scheduled and coordinated voice, networking, and virtualization teams to ensure availability and preparedness of required engineers and resources
- Lead go/no-go meetings to identify potential issues and roadblocks to successful migrations
Managed customer projects and delivery by establishing detailed project plans and timelines, assigning tasks to cross-functional team members, and communicating updates on project status, milestones, and roadblocks to key stakeholders.
Reduced deployment, validation, and user acceptance testing times by over 75%, from greater than 120 days to less than 30 days by writing Python programs to perform platform validation using a standardized baseline to automatically document and report potential issues and misconfigurations.
Designed hybrid platform, data center, and cloud solutions focused on Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, SD-WAN, SDN, UCS, and virtualization based products.
Remediated security issues highlighted by vulnerability assessments and penetration testing, providing written supporting documentation and responses as required for security management.
Reviewed product documentation, security alerts, and critical notifications from product vendors and prepare written reports on potential impacts and concerns for customers and management.
Created internal training and documentation for platform, voice engineering, and support operations teams.
Identified customer requirements and develop project scopes of work (SOW) and requirement documentation for new customer projects.
Developed automated monitoring systems for customer platforms to provide alerts to on-call staff through SMS, email, and instant messaging channels.

Senior UC Engineer
Enterprise Communications

West Technology Group, January 2013 – January 2015

Served as a senior engineer providing system, network, wireless, and security design recommendations and technical support to internal teams and technical customer contacts.

Designed, built, and maintained Cisco hosted collaboration (HCS) platforms on private cloud infrastructure.
Reviewed product documentation, security alerts, and critical notifications from product vendors to prepare written reports on potential impacts and security concerns for customers and management.
Worked with engineering team on the design, configuration, and technical support for 10,000+ user multi-cluster, hybrid HCS platform deployment. Designed and lead the deployment of globally distributed, multi-cluster Cisco Expressway system to provide secure hybrid connectivity.
Evaluated new features through Cisco Early Field Trials, pilot deployments, and platform testing including Cisco Expressway, Webex Meeting Center and Collaboration Meeting Room Single Sign On integrations.
Performed root cause analysis (RCA) of system failures, provided detailed technical and non-technical written explanations of RCA, along with recommendations for system improvements and modifications.

Senior Network and Security Engineer
Professional Services

West Technology Group, January 2010 – January 2013

Served in the network and security operations centers of a Fortune 500 corporation directly supporting network and security teams, and internal business units.

Guided customer global network projects through design and technical expertise.
Performed wireless site surveys, design, configuration and troubleshooting of multi-campus high availability Wi-Fi deployments.
Managed nationwide Wi-Fi security project deploying wireless rogue detection and security devices across all corporate sites throughout the United States.
Served as a Cisco Networking Academy instructor teaching CCNA level courses.

Education

Master of Information Technology Management

Colorado State University Global – Aurora, CO

August 2021 – March 2023
Graduated with distinguished honors and a specialization in Cybersecurity

Bachelor of Arts, Business Administration

Friends University – Wichita, KS

May 2007

Certifications & Awards

ISC2 Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) – Enterprise Infrastructure #28160
Cisco Certified DevNet Professional
CompTIA Security+ CE
Google Cloud Certified – Associate Cloud Engineer
BSA Eagle Scout

Technical Skills

Résumé