Chris Casciano

Promoted to drive talented team of enterprise consultants and technical architects, providing each member with the resources, guidance, evaluation, tools, training, and recommendations to achieve objectives.

• Ensure timely and quality resolution of escalated issues (technical and logistical), working closely with project management, sales, and additional leaders.
• Maintain high levels of customer satisfaction and retention by ensuring continuous delivery of services excellence.
• Collaborate with executive leaders to set technical direction, assess performance, and support strategic planning, organizational restructurings, and continuous improvements.

Key Highlights:

• Drove team to achieve $1.7M quarterly goals.
• Established work culture of cross-functional collaboration, optimizing cohesion and boosting productivity.
• Enhanced project management processes with creation of artifacts, tools, and standard documentation.
• Facilitated hiring and retention of quality talents by clearly defining job descriptions, interviewing candidates, and making effective hiring decisions.
• Coordinated changes implementation, workload prioritization, consulting projects assignation, and timely and quality delivery of customer engagements ranging in scale, value, and complexity.
• Spearheaded successful completion of Azure Cloud Adoption Framework projects (greenfield / brownfield), Azure Well Architected Framework assessments, Azure lift / shift migrations, Open AI deployments on Azure, and Infrastructure as Code engagements to refactor existing code or deploy new environments.

Orchestrated optimization of MS Azure environments across diverse organizations - providing expert assessments, architecting, planning, execution, and migrations.

• Led end-to-end Azure Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) process, subscription migrations, and CAF design and documentation process streamlining.
• Optimized cloud adoption with implementation of MS best practices.
• Provided design and configuration of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS resources

Key Highlights:

• Coordinated smooth migration of 2,800 servers in 215 customer environments to individual tenants / subscriptions - leveraging PowerShell automation for Azure environment deployment.
• Reduced file server drive size 99% via architecting and migration of 36 TB across 4 servers to Azure Files - leveraging Azure File Sync.
• Slashed costs while improving environment reliability as well as DR with comprehensive assessment of environments with 11 subscriptions and 4,500+ resources.

Headed management and support of IT infrastructure with ~95 users, covering IT data centers, security, disaster recovery, business continuity, servers, telephone systems, network, helpdesk, and middleware engineering/operations.

• Coached and coordinated teams, including systems administrators.
• Planned and administered $800K annual budget with focus on quality service delivery.
• Served as internal auditor focused on security issues, training staff and overseeing proper implementation of security policies / procedure organization wide.
• Managed HIPAA and PCI DSS compliance programs.
• Coordinated all aspects of software and hardware assets management, including inventory definition, deployment, configuration, and retirement.

Key Highlights:

• Played instrumental roles in infrastructure improvements and expansions in alignment with operational objectives.
• Minimized service issues and impact by standardizing methods and procedures for changes implementation and IT infrastructure control.
• Maintained excellence in IT operations via expert troubleshooting, monitoring, and upgrade of infrastructure equipment / systems.
• Optimized business continuity, disaster recovery, security, risks / vulnerability management, and user support functions.
• Collaborated with executive-level decision-makers and leaders in strategic planning, financial solutions development, and effective allocation of resources to support corporate objectives for future flexibility and growth.
• Enhanced team performance via training and motivational leadership, empowering individuals to resolve issues and own processes.
• Delivered savings by cultivating productive relationships with vendors and effectively negotiating mutually beneficial pricing.
• Facilitated corporate transition to fully remote by recommending and orchestrating migration from internal VMware infrastructure to MS Azure.
• Selected vendor to support migration, negotiated pricing, created comprehensive workbook (costs / budget), and played key leadership role in full project lifecycle - achieving successful completion with minor issues and business impact.
• Achieved disaster recovery plan simplification and timeframe reductions from up to 8 hours to less than 1.
• Architected and led VMware host replacement and SAN deployment from hardware selection and pricing negotiations to deployment, cabling, migration to scalable solution, and optimization of backup storage.
• Raised network reliability, scalability, and security while reducing load on firewall as well as switch/patch panel footprint.
• Implemented core switch and server rack switch, segmentation of network into logical VLANs, repurposing of hardware for access layer switching, consolidation of switching hardware, and deployment of enterprise grade wireless solutions.
• Elevated staff and customer experience by eliminating use of aging hardware, streamlining disaster recovery, and positioning company for mobile workforce.
• Led deployment of cloud phone system and contact center from product selection and vendor negotiations to rollout, saving 20% over traditional PBX solution.
• Played key role in HITRUST adoption, including control interpretation, policy and standard review, procedure creation, evidence gathering, technical remediation, and scoring.

Provided 24/7 support and management of IT systems, including Active Directory, Group Policy, File/Print sharing, WSUS, SQL, and DNS.

• Designed, installed, and maintained VMware vSphere clusters with shared SAN storage.
• Reconfigured and made additions to VMware virtual environments.
• Installed, configured, managed, and updated Microsoft Exchange.
• Performed server installation, configuration, and maintenance.
• Designed and configured network-wide disaster recovery plans.
• Worked collaboratively in troubleshooting and resolving critical issues.
• Served key role in improving security of multiple IT systems.

Oversaw support team of 15 specialists, delivering Tier 1, Tier 2, and Tier 3 services while managing rotating portfolio of 45+ projects.

• Functioned as key liaison for high-level, time critical, or sensitive issues.
• Ensured quality deliverables through final review and approval of project plans, purchases, changes, and technical communication to clients.
• Generated detailed performance reports to President, supporting big picture strategic planning, staffing, and decision-making.
• Designed, reviewed, and tested backup as well as disaster recovery plans.

Key Highlights:

• Played key role in managing application deployment and migration projects valued from $1K to $350K.
• Enhanced performance of technical team via mentoring and reviews, identifying and recommending opportunities for improvements
• Enforced best practices in regards to information systems configurations
• Contributed to improvements in security policies company-wide through policy enhancements.