Howard Mills Email & Phone Number

Walnut Creek, Ca, Us

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Promoted to drive strategy and day-to-day operations of organization-wide IT systems, incorporating help desk function following workforce reduction. Control multi-million dollar CAPEX and OPEX. Drive initiatives to reduce costs, boost infrastructure resiliency, and increase IT capabilities. Oversee 28 direct reports. Served on change management board and participated on CEO senior management committee. ✔ Established offshore system admin and database admin teams to meet 24x7 support needs of growing business; mentored, trained, and instilled in staff a sense of ownership in technical operations to improve morale.✔ Served as change manager on CAB for strategic change management. Implemented new infrastructure change approval workflow to reduce outages and improve operator efficiency.✔ Acted as disaster recovery (DR) coordinator directing all IT aspects of DR. Orchestrated annual offsite DR test for last 5 years and introduced continual improvements to DR process to ensure full recovery capability under RTO. Worked with business units to ensure completeness of their plans.✔ Composed comprehensive IT response for annual internal and external audits. Completed 2 external SOC1 audits with no significant findings. ✔ Entrusted as cybersecurity coordinator reengineering vulnerability management process and reducing security vulnerabilities across server environment by 96% in 12 months. ✔ Architected and relocated DR site following unexpected sale of co-located facility, repurposing existing technology due to lack of financial resources for new hardware. Migrated site with ~200 virtual machines and 100TB data with no business interruption.✔ Conducted remote data center migration following merger with another organization. Built out and validated DR container for new site (Boston, MA) within main data center (San Francisco, CA), freeing up, repurposing, and testing old DR site on the East Coast to perform as production site.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Entrusted to build and maintain reliable, cost-effective, and secure IT infrastructure through coordinating strategic initiatives to support 24x7x365 operations. Hired, trained, and managed staff. Led 15 globally dispersed direct reports. Set team goals and conducted performance reviews. Managed budget-compliant purchasing.✔ Shaped and implemented business-aligned IT systems roadmap, lowering costs, improving DR capabilities, increasing system availability, and promoting shared responsibility for system maintenance.✔ Upgraded mission-critical custom application hardware that was approaching end of life, overcoming major storage, dataset replication, response time, and availability issues. Re-architected technology stack to ensure backwards compatibility. Implemented daily dataset replication to NetApp HA filer and split resource management between storage and networking teams.✔ Consolidated multiple file servers (Unix and Windows) into single NetApp appliance platform to elevate storage efficiency, reduce related costs, and minimize replication times to DR environment. ✔ Drove infrastructure scalability without incurring additional headcount by introducing blade servers to remain on pace with VMware technology growth; rolled out other technologies to simplify maintenance.✔ Maximized mission-critical business systems availability by designing strategies to eliminate single points of failure and ensure system functionality.✔ Orchestrated seamless system changes and configurations through facilitating weekly board meetings to analyze problems and obtain approval and consensus for modifications.✔ Bolstered business continuity by directing semiannual DR testing and annual offsite DR testing with participation from the business.✔ Installed security patches and embedded rigorous data integrity and security standards to mitigate risk and ensure compliance with audit and regulatory procedure.

Boston, Massachusetts, Us

Maintained high-availability Windows 2000/NT server environment, including Active Directory, GPO management, DHCP, WINS, DNS, and security. Led projects to enhance infrastructure integrity. Managed backup solutions. Used CISCO 5500 and 5000 switches to support LAN infrastructure. Addressed escalated OS issues. Developed detailed technical documentation, such as DR procedures.

GT Global (LGT Asset Management)