Current Location: Cedar City, Utah
Contact me via LinkedIn
In October of 2012, I attended my first UtahSAINT conference and became a member of the UtahSAINT organization. Since then, I have attended most of the conferences through the years.
Not only have the conferences been a benefit to gaining skills in the IT Security, but I have also made many connections to others in the IT industry. The UtahSAINT organization consists of IT professionals throughout Utah and focuses on providing relevant information about network security.
In SAINTCon 2019, I had the opportunity to teach an all day training session titled "Active Directory: Elevate your Domain Security" which covered both attacking and defending an Active Directory domain.
For more information about the organization and conference, visit the UtahSAINT and SAINTCON websites.
In October of 2014, I attended my first Microsoft in Higher Education conference in Seattle and joined the group. I've attended in 2015, 2016, 2018, and 2019 as well. In 2016 and 2018, I gave a presentation about how we used RemoteApps at SUU to improve our security and availability of general IT tools. In 2019, I presented on Preventing Mimikatz Attacks.
The purpose of the conference is to get into more technical details of Microsoft's products that are generally used in education. It also gives an opportunity to Microsoft to get feedback from the higher education community. Topics usually include Windows Operating Systems (Server and Clients), PowerShell, Azure, Active Directory, and overall security.
For more information about the organization and conference, visit the Microsoft in HigherEd website.
In 2017, I attended the RSA Conference in San Francisco for the first time and have also attended in 2019. The RSA conference is one of the larger conferences for Cybersecurity professionals.
For more information about the conference and what types of training is offered, please visit the RSA Conference website.
In 2013, I joined the TTP group, which is an international group. This group is of individuals from educational institutions that use products from Micro Focus, NetIQ and SUSE. I've attended the TTP US conference in Provo each year from 2013 to 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2020. In the late fall of 2019, I had the opportunity to attend the Bangalore Technical Conference in India to participate in more technical sessions with developers for Micro Focus products.
For more information about the TTP group, visit The TTP website.
In May of 2013, I was able to attend a Dell BootKamp, which taught me how to use the Dell Kace K1000 and K2000 appliances. The K1000 is a systems management appliance, which we have deployed at SUU to manage computer updates, installed software, and provide a ticketing system for users to report problems. The K2000 appliance is used to deploy computer images and applications to the ~750 computers I manage for the students.
I have received certifications for two CompTIA certifications of the A+ and Network+.
I continue to work on various enterprise products at SUU. During the past year, I've setup and configured much of our Azure Active Directory environment including deployment of a few Azure VMs, installed two new servers with high-end GPUs into our Remote Desktop Services environment, and deployed docker images for LDAP authentication in our AWS cloud environment. Also, one of my self-assigned projects that I enjoyed was creating a Work from Home support group during the pandemic to provide communication and training to various campus employees in supporting their IT needs.
In 2019, I joined the USHE assessment team, which is a group of higher education IT professionals who visit the other higher education institutions in the state to do penetration testing and reporting of various ways the institution can improve their cyber security posture. I've also enjoyed the recent opportunity at SUU to participate in our first internal assessment which included opportunities to validate security controls as well as test our campus employees with a phishing attack.
At home, I do find some time to play with personal computer gear where I've implemented a network ad blocker called Pi-hole as well as tested Wireguard, which is a new VPN protocol. I also have had the opportunity to support our local church by recommending and using various platforms for web, video conferencing, and streaming.