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I am currently a Senior Network Security Product Architect at Rackspace, where prior to moving to Product last year in 2023, I worked in the Network Security Team since joining the company at the start of 2010. My main focus for the last 7+ years has been multicloud connectivity architecture, and more recently in the last few years, related automation, tooling and training, as well as being an escalation point for operations.
Prior to Rackspace, I was a Pre-sales Networking Specialist and then a Service Desk Engineer for two other Cisco Partners.
While in college back in 2005, I enrolled in the Cisco Networking Academy Program, which covered the CCNA curriculum 2 evenings a week, in person, for 2 academic years. I passed the INTRO exam during the 2006 summer break, and attained the full CCNA certification in early 2008. In 2009 I attained CCDA+CCNP and started teaching the CCNA curriculum at my Cisco Academy until 2012, and attained CCAI (Cisco Certified Academy Instructor). I attained CCSP (now CCNP Security) in 2010 and in 2013 I passed the CCIE Security Written exam. I attained CCDP (Cisco Certified Design Professional) in 2016 and passed the CCIE R&S Written exam in 2019. I attempted the CCIE Enterprise Infrastructure lab exam once in 2020.
In 2021 I started attending Packet Coders tech sessions which nurtured my interest in network monitoring and observability, and led to me spin up Prometheus, Telegraf, Grafana, loki, syslog-ng (etc) locally, to provide alerting, historical visibility, and a number of networking and non-networking related dashboards which are still active and in use.
In 2022, I attended a work tailored Palo Alto EDU-210 Training course, and attained the Aviatrix Certified Engineer Multi-Cloud Networking Associate and Multi-Cloud Networking Operations certification.
Last year in 2023, I attended an internal two day Project Management Series training, completed the Cisco Rev Up to Recert: Python training course, passed the Cisco DEVCOR 350-901 exam, earning the DevNet Specialist - Core certification, and completed the Cisco Rev Up to Recert: Network Automation training course. I also attained the Azure Network Engineer Associate and AWS Advanced Networking - Specialty certifications.
I am currently preparing for the Google Professional Cloud Network Engineer and Cisco DevNet Expert lab exam, and may also spend some time on the Oracle Multicloud Architect Associate certification.
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