Keith A. Ward Email & Phone Number

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

In this role, I play a pivotal role in the planning, costing, and deploying of Infrastructure Technologies and Platforms to meet internal business requirements and align IT resources within company objectives. I lead project onboarding activities for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure projects, including requirement gathering, cost estimation, and resource allocation for mergers, acquisitions, and internal projects. I also contribute to the virtual desktop infrastructure's lifecycle management, including the creation and deployment of Windows 10 multi-session golden images to maintain system efficiency, as well as the management of security endpoint controls. Furthermore, I am a Member of the Global "Follow the Sun" Infrastructure Support team to manage and mitigate vulnerabilities across on-premises servers to enhance system security and reliability.Key Accomplishments:► Enabled 4.5K users to work remotely during the COVID pandemic by upgrading the Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) Host Infrastructure, providing easy access to critical applications through personal devices.►Transitioning to Azure Files premium SMB storage accounts from Azure NetApp files minimized storage expenses by 60% without compromising performance standards.► Improved user profile management across multi-session environments by adopting the Microsoft FSLogix solution within Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD), ensuring consistency of user settings and documents across sessions and optimizing performance with Microsoft Office 365 and Teams.► Increased operational effectiveness and expedited issue resolution processes by integrating AVD Insights for thorough monitoring and troubleshooting of network latency, user login performance, and session host health.► Elevated AVD infrastructure performance by incorporating advanced functionalities, including Azure Autoscale, Azure Bastion, Azure Backup, and MSIX App attach, resulting in improved scalability, heightened security, and simplified administration.

Tampa/St. Petersburg, Florida Area

During this tenure, I led the charge in the design, management, and maintenance of a robust multi-site VMware / Quest vWorkspace virtual desktop environment to support the seamless operation of over 1.2K virtual desktops. My leadership extended to the direction of virtual desktop project deployments to ensure they underwent rigorous testing and certification to meet the stringent requirements of our business units. Through my initiative, we refined workload management practices and significantly enhanced performance across ESX hosts by conducting thorough VMware ESX host maintenance. At the helm of integrating Active Directory and Group Policy, I simplified user access control and improved capacities for managing virtual desktops.Key Accomplishments:► Strengthened disaster recovery capabilities at the site level and optimized user login performance through the creation and application of a specialized Microsoft DFS infrastructure catering to roaming profile users.► Solved complex performance issues over time with virtual desktops and hosted applications by leveraging Liquidware Labs / Stratusphere UX & FIT monitoring tools. Analyzed and documented business units' desktop applications, settings, and use cases to simplify VDI project design and integration procedures, leading to successful desktop virtualization project executions.► Aided in strategic planning and capacity management decisions for the VDI farm by effectively presenting crucial capacity and resource consumption insights to executive leadership.► Provided secure remote access for offshore project deployments as the primary resource for Business Analysts and IT Project Managers in call centers, back-office, development, and quality assurance departments.► Optimized the management of the OS System Stack for virtual machines, including Windows 7, Linux (CentOS), and Server 2012, resulting in increased system reliability and performance.