Simon Thomas Email & Phone Number

Reading, England, United Kingdom

• Currently working as a 3rd Line engineer providing support for Check Point products including: VSX, Maestro, Spark/SMB, Harmony SASE and Harmony Endpoint Client which typically involves:
• Troubleshooting firewall issues with traffic flow, IPSEC VPNs, certificates, slow performance, crashes, upgrades, and integration with 3rd Party tools; both on-premises and in Azure / AWS.
• Troubleshooting Harmony Endpoint issues on Windows and macOS.
• Assessing vulnerability reports and advising on upgrades or remediation steps.
• Managing the lab VMware environment including the automation of firewall builds using Ansible.

• Promoted to the Firewall Support Engineering team where I was part of a 24/7 global SOC managingthousands of firewalls worldwide for a wide variety of clients, where my duties included:
• Providing 3rd line support for firewall upgrade, incident and change tickets on platforms includingCheck Point, Palo Alto, Fortinet, NetScreen, Cisco ASA / FirePower and SonicWall.
• Assisting the account team by acting as a technical trusted advisor on service review calls with high value customers.
• Troubleshooting firewall event reporting issues with the Secureworks SIEM.
• Managing estate wide firewall upgrade projects in response to security vulnerabilities and end of lifeannouncements.
• Creating and delivering technical training, including mentoring and providing one to one training sessions for 2nd line engineers.

• I worked as part of the 3rd line support team within the busy UK SOC, where my responsibilities included:
• Handling customer incident and change tickets on: Check Point, Cisco ASA, and Juniper NetScreenfirewalls, Blue Coat proxies and Cisco IOS switches and routers.
• Acting as the subject matter expert (SME) for LogLogic SIEM, Cisco IPS and Cisco CSA Endpoint.
• Conducting project work including onboarding new clients and performing device migrations.
• Analysing IPS security alerts and escalating to the client or applying tuning as appropriate.
• Peer reviewing change plans and acting as an escalation point for first and second-line support staff.

• Joined BT as a permanent employee via the graduate recruitment programme and took up a position on the internal network monitoring and IPS team where my duties included:
• Deploying, tuning, and then managing a platform of Cisco IPS Sensors.
• Upgrading a UK wide Arbor Peakflow X network anomaly detection system deployment and then managing the hand over to the operations team.
• Working with vendors to run evaluations and proof of concept trials of new security products such as: Cisco MARS, Cisco Security Manager and Niksun Netdetector.

• Previously employed in an office administration role, I moved into a 2nd line technical support role in the BT internal firewall team supporting a worldwide deployment of over 700 Check Point firewalls.
• Initially responsible for firewall rule base changes and dealing with fault tickets.
• Progressed to managing the 3rd party VPN platform which involved liaising with external companies to setup and troubleshoot IPSEC VPNs connections into BT.
• By the end of my first twelve months, I was a project engineer leading on new Check Point firewall deployments, upgrades, and platform migrations