My Projects and Achievements

All systems eventually fail. Therefore, it is of upmost importance to have a recovery plan in case of a disaster. Disaster recovery plans must allow the IT department to recover systems in a reasonable amount of time. Over the span of my career I have come to notice that small/medium businesses tend to have difficulties creating a cost effective DRP (mostly due to the added costs of maintaining disaster recovery systems).

One of the biggest projects I lead involved creating redundant systems for my first employer (wasocal.com) in-house servers on AWS. These servers included domain controllers and a distributed file server.

Data redundancy is a cornerstones of any successful infrastructure. Over the span of my career I deployed several NAS devices (mostly Synology) to reassure my employers (typically small businesses) that their data was safe in case of a hardware failure or data corruption.

When COVID forced my employer at the time (wasocal.com) to send most of their employees home the IT department started noticing that an increasing number of workstations on our domain were being reported by TrendMicro (our AV) as not having upto date signatures and several were not getting recently deployed policies (software whitelists etc) (this was due to the fact that the employees were working from home and some would wait weeks before using the VPN to connect to the corporate network). In order to accommodate this new change we transitioned our TrendMicro server to the cloud and pointed all workstations to that new server.

Finding an effective budget friendly monitoring solution for small businesses is quite a challenge. I have deployed software like Site24x7 as a budget friendly effective monitoring application.

Single points of failures are the bane of most IT departments and over the span of my career I had the honor of eliminating a few. On one specific instance one of my employers had placed all their network work loads on one server called Main-Server (running windows server 2008). Eventually in late 2018 an OS update caused sporadic service failures that could only be resolved by restarting the server. This lead to multiple instances where the IT department was forced to ask employees to save their work or risk losing data because services like the print management service had failed and the server had to be restarted and the Main-Server handled windows file shares. I eventually split Main-Server to three servers (application server, file server, print server)

Recommended by the hosts of SecurityNow Thinkst Canary are easy to deploy honeypots that I deployed at Western Allied Corp (wasocal.com) to provide added insight to our network. They work flawlessly and have easy to deploy opensource tools at (canarytokens.org)

Between the years of 2019-2022 I deployed three unique VLANs using multiple vendors like SonicWALL and Ubiquiti.
1) Public Web Server (Hosted Internally)
2) IOT Systems (printers, cameras, HVAC)
3) Physical Access Controls

One of my employers was a small construction company that needed a cost effective way to manage mobile devices that were either lost or kept by ex employee. During the span of my employment I had deployed the Gsuite MDM to monitor and list employee mobile devices and locate/recover phone if they were ever lost.

Some of my proudest achievements will always be increasing the level of security awareness across companies I worked with using tools like TrendMicro Phishinsignt.

Windows Event Viewer is the greatest troubleshooting tool a sysadmin can use when diagnosing problems in Windows environments. Netwrix integrates with the viewer and takes it to another level by generating and sending scheduled reports to provide detailed insight into active directory and adding alerts once user defined events occurred (instead of having to resort to task scheduler).

Often an overlooked area of information security. Physical access controls should be seen as the first line of defense when attempting to secure any facility and its digital assets. I have worked with solutions provided by TRL Systems (est. 1981) and Ring (est. 2012). Ultimately because Ring products seamlessly integrate with our everyday devices (phones,etc) they are able to provide a far superior product than what companies like TRL, ADT, etc can provide.