Wesley Sparks Email and Phone Number

Currently helping lead the Cloud Devops team that is executing a large digital transformation to AWS cloud, I am overseeing the development and deployment of highly available and scalable AWS cloud architectures that support critical business applications and services. Addressing technical debt is a key focus, resulting in a more robust and resilient IT environment with increased capacity to innovate and respond to changing business needs. This is expected to lead to improved scalability, operational efficiency and reliability of the company's systems and increased business agility.

- Spent 8 months in a staff augmentation role as Technology Director for one of Atlanta's 40 fastest growing companies. A long time customer had lost their current director, abruptly, reducing leadership and guidance for the current IT group. I was asked to step in to this role until they could find a full time replacement.- Worked with one of our largest clients who was going through a multi-billion dollar merger. We worked with their data center and virtualization teams to design a new pod based infrastructure for a new disaster recovery data center and an upgrade to the existing. Our assistance helped this client reduce downtime and issues during this merger which could have caused significant financial damage.- There are times, even as an engineer, when you are asked to step outside your comfort zone to join a firefight with a client who is in the middle of an unexpected outage. One such client was in this exact predicament where our manage service team nor Cisco could pinpoint the issue. Once we were engaged we were able to calm the client down, work with the local IT team and vendor to find a root cause and solve the issue. This issue plagued them on several occasions, solving it mitigated future outages and had a profound impact on their business.- Worked within the cloud, data center, software defined data center, networking and security practices helping to transform these service delivery teams, by constantly delivering impactful solutions, through continuous improvement, consistently meeting NPS goals.

Bootstrapped a small Managed Services company, taking it from zero customers and zero revenue, to capturing 15 clients and 400K+ in revenue.

- In charge of driving enterprise operations network and data center related projects supporting 3500+ users, 60 locations, and in a multitude of organizations, disciplines, and end user services- Instilled best of breed technologies for data center automation and monitoring enhancing service levels and reducing down time events throughout the WAN infrastructure and data center services- Implemented orchestration tools within the data center allowing for greater flexibility, automated access to compute resources for business unit administrators, and allowed operations to balance resources with business requirements enhancing overall support and delivery.- Strengthened security posturing by streamlining incident management, remediation, and containment, security policy initiatives, network security best practices, and proper end user training. - Served on the disaster recovery team as the technical architect. I integrated, implemented, and validated the overall design for network, WAN, storage, facilities, and demonstrated the capability of replicating data from production to the recovery site. Successful testing showed we can meet all recovery time objectives and compliance.- Reshaped WAN and data center access switching from a DMVPN based WAN to a carrier grade MPLS private cloud. Enhancements included QoS tagging for critical data, allowing voice traffic to be prioritized during a companywide Cisco voice implementation, reduced downtime, lowered latency, and increased bandwidth to data center services. This solution had the added benefit of reducing our budget by a quarter million dollars.

- Advanced the SSF program development lifecycle through a highly skilled integration team and collaboration- Resolved issues with new software builds applied to the infrastructure during range, lab, and production testing. Our team examined traffic and captured debugging logs during test, providing them to the development teams for speedier resolution - As the integration team we supported the integration of SSF software on the AIX and RHEL platform servers, real time WAN circuit monitoring and troubleshooting, and collaborated with multiple organizations across the globe in support of missile defense testing.- Continually met tight deadlines for the integration of software into the field, through levels of constant testing, execution, and updates

- Successfully navigated a diverse, multi-national, multi-lingual development team to reshape the organizations priorities during a major transition from one development environment to a newer IDE- Coordinated the effort to rapidly respond to real time issues during software updates through proper service desk support and rapid deployment of new resources closer to issues. This reduced time to resolution significantly.- Collaborated with the UAE Special Operations Group IT organization to design and validate their network met both the software and development team requirements- While I managed the relationship of GAL to its customer in the UAE Special Forces, I also led a small IT team for GAL, coordinating the implementation of a Cisco based network, Cisco VoIP, solving issues with outages and rapid growth within the organization- Constructed and successfully taught a basic network curriculum to this diverse community, both for GAL and the Special Operations Group.

- Provided internal networking engineering for a defense contractor. Redesigned the corporate network to adhere to Cisco best practices.- Provided consultative network, server, and Cisco VoIP support and solutions for commercial customers of EDO-CAS.- Implemented an application/web-hosting cloud infrastructure platform with-in a collocation facility.- Designed and implemented the provider network with-in the collocation facility, administering multiple Linux servers inside the