Matthew Ward Email & Phone Number

Palmdale, Ca, Us

Palmdale, Ca, Us

Led the Central Tech DevOps team of 12 employees, continuing with Global Hosting Support operations for Glu Studios and EA Sports mobile cloud hosted environments. Managed cloud cost reallocations to business units and ongoing business relationships with Amazon in maintaining cost reduction strategies. > Helped define overall direction, strategies, programs, and projects to achieve goals as a member of the Mobile Central Tech Leadership Team in relationship to IT, DevOps, Infrastructure and Security.> Facilitated the transition from Glu to EA processes by integrating with various EA central service teams on best practice security objectives, related to DPA audits, and integration of cloud cost management, and best practices and standards-based workflow and ongoing asset management and service delivery conformance to policy.> Led DevOps through multiple game launches, including Madden Mobile 23&24, NBA Mobile and UFC Mobile as well as ongoing operations and support of several catalog games and all Mobile Central Tech provided services.> Introduced SLI initiatives to standardize team and service performance metrics.> Organized DevOps Sr leadership group – Organized senior and lead team members in weekly standup meeting to encourage sharing of ideas, projects, challenges, and successes of current and future workstreams. Encouraged ownership, communication, structure, and identity.

Led AWS production operations group, focused on online services for central tech group. Implemented procedures and policies that led to efficient deployment practices and the ability to launch full environments with hundreds of servers with varying configurations. Bridged communication gap between technical team and management.– Over 50% savings by modeling and implementing enterprise EDP programs, and various strategies.– Led teams up to 9 employees, prioritizing employee development and fostering a culture of continuous learning and innovation while formalizing processes and adhering to official standards.– Led DevOps and Security teams, ensuring successful game launches through support, scalable deployments, workflow management, on-call support, automation, and seamless integration with various systems and transition to container and Kubernetes infrastructure Utilizing Amazon EKS, ECS, and a wide range of other platform services.– Drove production and operational efficiency by introducing a global hosting studio support concept as well as being in a virtual security operations group leadership & technical role, implemented policies, processes, and tools to manage incidents, breaches, security tools and best practices guidance.– Designed SEIM Infrastructure: Providing detection and remediation methods, centralizing Cloud, PaaS, DLP, MDR, etc.– Integrated authentication and authorization process for BI data into Snowflake as well as championed the security controls for handling potential PII data and masking or anonymizing the data in compliance with GDPR standards and other privacy related regulations.– Member of the Legal Department's Privacy Committee, accountable for identifying, classifying, and managing PII data across internal corporate repositories and customer data, while also pioneering a PII management system requiring monthly acknowledgment from Data Owners regarding the review and proper handling of identified data.

Designed, implemented, and managed migration to Office365 as one of the first pilot projects within News Corp. Implemented change control policy and change management process. Designed and implemented full virtualization of all Linux. Ran online multiplayer operations for Rockstar’s Grand Theft Auto IV, Nintendo’s Mario Kart and other Xbox and PlayStation gaming titles. Developed effective strategy for task automation to reduce task repetition and time to recover.> Led a team of 8 ranging from IT helpdesk to corporate and online production services. Jointly responsible for a $66M Microsoft licensing budget with various departments including IGN, Myspace, Fox Entertainment, Fox News and NewsCorp and Microsoft Enterprise solutions teams.> Initiated and managed the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV for Xbox Live and PC, including the setup and maintenance of all servers, overseeing deployment and operations, and orchestrating a successful full game release.> Improved security and authorization through full Active Directory reorganization with sites, trusts and robust group management implementation.> Reduced costs by $5M per year, managed downsizing, and led data center consolidation from 600 physical servers to 150 with a 90% virtualization rate by restructuring team and establishing new strategies and goals to ensure long-term viability across changing demographic and economic environments.> Drove a 60% cost reduction by leveraging Microsoft relationships and created Senior leadership buy in to successfully transition corporate messaging services to Office365 cloud email structure for multiple terabyte reduction in local storage and support requirements. Architected, planned, and executed full transition.

Managed technology needs planning and budget development. Designed, implemented and managed Microsoft infrastructure required by new operations to capacity, uptime and scalable demand. Integrated new systems with parent company systems. Promoted to Director during the purchase of Myspace from Intermix Media.> Drove Data Center migration across all facilities for servers supporting all business, and entertainment-based systems including, American Idol, and various e-commerce platforms. Consolidating servers and services with minimum downtime and operations disruption.> Led a team of 6 employees, leading Primarily Windows-based architecture to host game services ensuring optimal performance and reliability for players worldwide.

Designed and managed network infrastructure for popular websites, delivering more than 1B emails per month. Provided 24/7 on-call support and monitoring. Oversaw production policy and procedures creation, systems integration, and efficiency enhancement. Led design and management of corporate network infrastructure including base network and servers. Implemented key technology upgrades. Played a vital role in the creation and launch of social site, Myspace.> Managed 4 data facilities with over 300 servers and supervised a team of 4 technicians, designing, deploying, and migrating a full datacenter.> Significantly reduced downtime and costs while improving efficiencies by developing and implementing better production standards and procedures.> Created server and network security policies, procedures, and controls reducing configuration and control errors and significantly improved server and network update procedures.> Created monitoring and metrics platform significantly reducing risks of unknown incidents and increasing reaction time as well as consistently measuring general resources over time.> Led, planned, designed, and built 4 data center environments including leading, planning, and executing system, network, and equipment migrations and reconfigurations. Ranging from short notice unplug and move to near 0 downtime heavily planned and coordinated cutover.