Brian Anderson

In this role, I consult with clients in diverse industries regarding information security, compliance, and operations in cloud environments. I create protocols, policies, and security plans to help clients improve their security posture and reduce risk. I strengthened the information security framework for a global SaaS software client, obtained a SOC 2 Type II report, and streamlined the security review process with prospects to decrease time to sale.

In this position, I direct security, risk, and compliance with an eleven-person team and two direct reports while driving quality releases through implementation of DevOps framework in collaboration with product management and engineering teams. I also provide the security perspective and focus to business and technology partnerships to build security into new initiatives. I manage the budget and cost control, ensure cloud environment is architected to comply with contracted SLAs, and create and test incident response and disaster recovery plans. Moreover, I liaise with legal counsel to meet compliance with GDPR and other privacy regulations. I also communicate regularly with C-suite and Board of Directors with updates and KPIs. A few notable achievements include: • Created security and compliance programs from scratch, covering all facets of information security. • Reduced time to resolution for production issues through proactive monitoring and management of Rapid Response Team of developers. • Achieved SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 for uPerform digital learning SaaS application running on AWS. • Implemented EDR and MDR solutions to increase visibility and decrease time to detection / resolution of incident. • Ensured rapid recovery in case of outage or breach for both SaaS and corporate environments.

As Director of IT and Cloud Operations, I defined the strategy and led a remote team of eight people responsible for internal IT and customer-facing AWS systems. I utilized a wide variety of data sources to develop analysis, scenarios, and insights to help the team identify paths to cloud growth, address key challenges, and make data-based decisions. I also established a healthy workplace culture of automation, proactivity, monitoring, runbooks, and blameless continuous improvement. I recruited, hired, trained, and transformed the IT organization to meet business objectives. Some contributions include: • Identified key investments to drive down costs and improve scalability and availability. • Reduced delivery cost for uPerform hosting every year since inception through AWS price reductions, AWS reserved instances, automated process, and advances in technology. • Enabled compliance and boosted product management with improved analytics data gathered from numerous sources and consolidated into Salesforce. • Recommended uptake of new technology trends and identified potential business obstacles or issues.

As Manager of Cloud Operations, I directed five-person DevOps team responsible for internal development and testing as well as external production environments. Spearheaded infrastructure around security best practices, repeatability, scalability, high availability, and disaster recovery. Created scalable process to execute effective upgrades, recovery, and operations for hosted environments. Defined strategies and solutions to expand use of public cloud services for reliable, efficient, and repeatable testing with Azure. Some contributions include: • Implemented SumoLogic to aggregate logs from hosted environments for proactive issue detection and valuable usage analytics. • Recognized for successfully developing and operationalizing AWS-hosted uPerform with average uptime 99.5+% despite single tenant application server limitation. • Launched SaaS based cloud application running on Azure, supported Ruby on Rails application on AWS and EngineYard, and served in 24/7/365 on-call rotation to minimize downtime.

As Manager of Technical Solutions, I managed 14-person team supporting uPerform and InfoPak for 4000+ clients globally. Shifted culture to root cause analysis, cross-team knowledge sharing, and proactive support. Liaised with developers to devise solutions for complex technical issues using analytical problem-solving approach. Some contributions include: • Delivered 99.9% SLA; implemented VMware workstation and MSDN licenses across support teams to reduce resolution time and increase customer satisfaction. • SME for authentication, database, network, and virtualization issues.