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.• Supporting and patching the SOC backend Windows and Linux server infrastructure.

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