Andrew Westrem

• Provide advisory and break-fix solutions for Microsoft customers in Azure Networking products with a regional focus of Japan.
• Triage, diagnose, and resolve Azure networking problems related to performance, configuration, and connectivity issues impacting business continuity.
• Work closely with global peers from Support, Developers, Product groups to solve networking issues and improve networking products and tooling.

Business infrastructure

• Worked with Systems and Development teams to provide efficient application delivery by load balancing, SSL offloading, and DNS management.
• Built site-to-site IPsec VPN tunnels from ERP environment to cloud services for all financial transactions in organization, and between regional campuses to assist expanding Veterinary School of Medicine.
• Migrated multi-area OSPF networks onto Palo Alto firewalls and extended VXLANs to improve inter-campus communications.
• Integrated networking devices into SolarWinds Network Performance Monitor to gain visibility into state of devices and traffic to reduce outages and maintain approximately 99.9% uptime.

Security

• Enhanced campus-wide network security by employing granular access with NGFWs and bolstered layer 2/3 stability with 802.1X, DHCP snooping, DIA, port security, etc.
• Built security profiles and policies on Palo Alto firewalls and Cisco ASAs to secure access to university resources.
• Deployed 802.1X with external web authentication using Cisco ISE, FreeRADIUS, and Microsoft NPS to create custom solutions for wireless authentication.

Automation

• Spearheaded automation projects using Git, Python, RESTCONF, and Ansible to replace networks that were 100% manually configured to less than 50%.
• Standardized and abstracted device configurations to establish pipelines for provisioning, configuring, and backing up devices in multi-vendor networks that saved networking team approximately 20 hours per week.
• Compared device configurations with desired states and ran compliance checks to ensure alignment with business needs and operational consistency.

• Served as the DigiCert expert on the team to provide PKI support for encrypting and authenticating emails on end-user devices.
• Tackled the most difficult problems and served VIP clients, completed most tickets per day repeatedly (>15), and trained other technicians.

• Cultivated trustworthy partnerships with community leaders, especially Japanese organizations, to increase self-response rates by approximately 1% weekly during 2020. Spoke on behalf of Census Bureau in Japanese interview with Sakura Radio.
• Optimized communication between internal and external departments to initiate outreach events that had up to 40,000 participants.
• Conducted outreach to over 150 schools in Manhattan and Queens in a span of two weeks to create commitments and events to integrate Statistics in Schools program. Received Special Acts Award.