Lyle Merdan - 🚀

Lyle Merdan - 🚀

System Administrator

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location of Lyle Merdan - 🚀Flower Mound, Texas, United States

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  • Timeline

  • About me

    Infrastructure, Security, Compliance - Oh My!

  • Education

    • Saint John's University

      1992 - 1994
  • Experience

    • USWest

      Sept 1997 - Jan 2001
      System Administrator

      Responsible for the installation and maintenance of 600 local and 2300 remote Solaris workstations across 14 states and 120 locations.•Directed daily break / fix activity of contracted associate system administrators.•Perform tasks / technical research as assigned by technical lead for the streamlining of employee workflow and reduction of ticket.• Responsible for administration of NIS, DNS, NFS, NTP, SSH, Jumpstart and server application monitoring.•Prepared servers and workstations for deployment at local and remote sites.•Participated in capacity planning to ensure quality of service for workstation and server applications.• Maintained compliance with the change control process to minimize downtime.•Coordinate troubleshooting efforts with network team when connectivity issues arise.•Developed monitoring tools to automatically diagnose and repair a variety of application and user failures to reduce new support tickets. Show less

    • QLogic, a wholly owned subsidiary of Cavium, Inc.

      Jan 2001 - Sept 2012
      Senior Technical Support Engineer

      Technical Support Engineer within Global Services Unit. Responsible for third level support cases from channel customers and the Sun/Oracle, HDS, EMC, and Cisco OEM accounts.• Primary QLogic support engineer for the Southeast United States region.• Support engineer for entire for FC, FCoE, iSCSI, and network adapter and switch products starting with system / software design, through end of life.•Designed and developed end user centric acceptance tests and evaluated results for conformance to customer plans and specifications.•Developed tools to streamline support experience with configuration gathering and analysis.•Mentored level 1 and 2 technical support engineers.•Elite Services Engineer for eBay/PayPal. Dedicated engineer providing expertise for the FC driver stack within the customer’s environments.•Designed and implemented test environment for screening defective host bus adapters at OEM depot locations, minimizing the number of NTF [no trouble found] returns.•Direct involvement with software and hardware developers for supporting and enhancing products to improve customer experience.•Recognized as a leader in support and chosen to participate in University of New Hampshire hosted FCIA multi-vendor plugfests for FC and FCoE and was able to identify issues with interoperability in unreleased products.•Provide technical assistance and sales support to the OEM and Channel sales teams.•Performed on site support when needed for customers including the capture of storage traffic and analyzing the traces using Finisar protocol analyzers.•Delivered advanced on-site training for Fibre-Channel products at eBay/PayPal, Sun Microsystems, Bell South, Computer Sciences Corporation, SunGard and Hitachi Data Systems at their Odawara Japan location.•Perform initial triage for developers from log analysis to system core/kernel crash dump analysis on Windows 2003/8, Solaris 8 through 11, Redhat 5 and 6, and VMware ESX 4 and 5. Show less

    • MTS Systems Corporation

      Oct 2012 - Mar 2018

      Administration of Netapp SAN, with AIX and IBM Blade Center VMware cluster.Upgraded from IBM Blade Center to Cisco UCS blades for the VMware environment.Assisted primary administrator for the Cisco Nexus 9000 Datacenter switch due to my experience with the Nexus platform.Primary implementor of a new Hitachi Vantra UCP blade cluster for VMware along with HNAS and VSP storage with synchronous replication between two datacenters.Deployed CommVault backup along with Nimble storage at remote locations.Deployed and maintained Cisco IOS XE based wireless platform across 10 sites for 3000 employees.Partner with network team on reliability and performance of corporate network consisting of 10 office and manufacturing sites along with a co‑located hot DR site.Partnered with IT security team to vastly improve the security posture of the corporate server farm and corporate network shares using Rapid7 Nexpose vulnerability scanner and Varonis DatAdvantage data audit and protection and DatAlert DLP user behavior analytics software.Worked to continually improve operations and schedule workloads to minimize disruptions to other departments.Deployed Check_MK system monitoring throughout the corporation. Show less • Netapp SAN administrator with Brocade switches. System consisted of tier 1 to 2 and a one way DR storage snapmirror relationships.• Perform planning and configuration for storage activities related to AIX SAP systems along with IBM Blade Center VMware environment.Work with infrastructure team to cross train on various systems including Netapp, Websense, MS Exchange, Active Directory, VMware, Cisco UCS, Cisco switches and Cisco Call Manager.• System administrator for the VMware environment with over 80% of corporate servers operating within the clusters.• Participated in deploying Cisco call manager within the 1000 desk facility.• Corporate network overhaul. Worked on the replacement of 10+ year old switches with modern technology increasing reliability and visibility into the corporate network and performance issues. • Worked alongside infrastructure team on virtualizing 60+ servers comprised of 50% of rack space within the HQ datacenter.• Act as a secondary resource for the network infrastructure team with regards to the local area network and as a bridge between the server and network team.• Primary administrator of the Aruba Networks wireless network within the office and manufacturing facility.• Coordinated critical server application maintenance and upgrades within company. Microsoft Team Foundation Suite and Solidworks are two examples.• Planned and coordinated the upgrade of a dozen legacy applications over 10 years old.• Implement centralized log management collectors of cloud-based service provider SumoLogic.• Acted as a Level 2 technical resource for corporate desktop helpdesk. Show less

      • Lead IT Enterprise Systems Administrator

        Oct 2014 - Mar 2018
      • Network Systems Analyst - Contractor

        Oct 2012 - Oct 2014
    • Wellbeats Wellness, a product of LifeSpeak Inc.

      Sept 2018 - Jun 2021
      Program Manager: Privacy, Security, Compliance

      Developed, implemented, and maintained entity security controls and procedures to comply with applicable aspects of HIPAA, GDPR, PIPEDA, CCPA and GLBA.Updated corporate policies to support security, development, and compliance activities to align with AICPA Trust Services Criteria of Security, Availability, Confidentiality, & Privacy.Managed annual SOC 2 Type II audits, resulting in attestations with zero findings.Backup to the Director of IT for systems administration and end user support.Participated in Azure architectural planning and implementation of networks, VPNs, Firewalls, virtual machines, network security groups, front door, storage, and app services, improving system security and availability.Replaced Sonicwall firewall and Barracuda WAF with Sophos on‑prem and in‑cloud firewalls including WAF and adding three way VPN between primary office, company filming studio and Azure including VPN access for remote users.Implemented Synology NAS for video assets and multi‑site backup.Deployed NinjaOne Remote Management and Monitoring solution to streamline support and management of corporate assets.Conducted ongoing vulnerability scanning and remediation using OWASP and Greenbone vulnerability scanner.Implemented and managed Forcepoint DLP solution for visibility of PHI locations reducing the risk of data disclosure.Completed customer cybersecurity questionnaires for third party compliance.Provided technical guidance and assistance for the Kiosk support team to extend the life of a product line. Show less

    • Pleasant Health

      Jun 2021 - Sept 2023
      Manager

      Pleasant Health is my company. It is a Manager Service Provider targeting small private healthcare practices in need of HIPAA compliance for the Security and Technical riles.Conducted risk assessments and documented remediation for compliance with the HIPAA security rule, reducing the risk of security incidents.Provided targeted security awareness training for high‑risk personnel to further reduce risk of security incidents.Utilize the Center for Internet Security controls across all customer applications and systems to reduce risk of security incidents.Developed and implemented appropriate policies and procedures to ensure ongoing HIPAA compliance.Completed cybersecurity questionnaires for third party vendor analysis for company cybersecurity insurance providers, ensuring compliance with all relevant regulations.Perform other various IT centric tasks as the business and customers needed.Create and present STRIDE based threat models to assist communicating concerns.Developed and implemented appropriate business continuity and disaster recovery plans for customers.Created playbooks for onboarding new M365 clients and securing their software stack.My MSP tech stack consists of: N‑Able RMM, M365 with Intune, HubSpot, Sentinel‑1 EDR, SIMPLERISK Governance, Risk Management and Compliance (GRC) solution Show less

    • Undisclosed

      Oct 2023 - now
      Manager - IT Infrastructure and Security
  • Licenses & Certifications