Nicholas Rickards Email & Phone Number

Columbus, Ohio, United States

Columbus, Ohio Area

- Managing firewall configuration, deployment, maintenance, and monitoring for 200+ clients, implementing industry best practices to optimize network security. - Responding to cyber incidents to rapidly and effectively mitigate security breaches. Performing recovery operations when necessary. - Advising clients on best practices for network security and performing assessments to help them make informed decisions to protect their digital assets. - Establishing site-to-site and client VPNs to enhance remote access security. Successfully transitioned 32 clients to support work-from-home in 2020. - Proactively maintaining clients' adherence to compliance standards, including PCI DSS and HIPAA. Swiftly addressing vulnerabilities by tightening firewall configurations, isolating sensitive networks, upgrading software, and retiring outdated products and protocols.- Providing comprehensive support for Microsoft Windows Server in an enterprise environment. - - Diagnosing and resolving system performance problems, connectivity issues, and security concerns. - Mentoring junior technicians, developing comprehensive documentation, creating training materials, and collaborating with colleagues to address complex challenges.

Columbus, Ohio, United States

- Responsible for maintaining and monitoring 80 customer servers and 60 WatchGuard firewalls. - Provided on-site and remote desktop support to customers. Performed installation of new servers, workstations, and network devices. - Optimized existing network infrastructure and recommended upgrades. - Discovered and implemented a free asset tracking system which created a complete documentation of clients’ networks and saved approximately 120hrs/month of manual documentation. - Maintained customer relationships and received the highest average score of all consultants on customer satisfaction surveys. - Led an initiative to virtualize 25 critical servers, enhancing recovery times by up to 90% in the event of a total hardware failure. - Developed an improved security policy to better protect both our and clients’ networks.

Columbus, Ohio, United States

- Provided helpdesk support for over 1000 computers and users. Maintained a 98% satisfaction rate on user surveys. - Performed network administration via Active Directory and Group Policy. - Responsible for detecting, removing, and recovering from malware infections on individual workstations.