I worked for a partner consultantancy with the Software and Configuration Management team to extend and customise BMC Discovery to provide support for their licensing and auditing function. With the software license discovery and modelling that I workend on both indendently and sometimes as part of a team, the bank was able to make substantial savings in the 100’s of thousands of US Dollars on licensing to vendors such as Oracle, IBM and Microsoft.

I worked under and Agile framework to develop TPL code, performed monthly regression analysis on software install data and created and maintained all documentation for customisations.

I was also part of the team to code and develop an extension that modelled their various SAN storage solutions deployed. After the solution was implemented, the bank was able to identify 10,000 US Dollars in monthly savings by being able to turn off a decommission storage arrays that were no longer being used.

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A leading US Investment Bank wanted to extend their off-the-shelf scanning solution to discover edge devices and follow hops to find the very edge of the network. This was not possible OOTB.

I developed a small solution comprising of shell scripting and TPL to discover and map the edge devices which allowed identification of unmonitored networks within the Bank’s infrastructure. The output was sent to CSV files which was the format requested for injestion into their network monitoring tool.

I also wrote a TPL file to discover Windows disk drives, which was another requirement from the client. I finished up by writing full documentation on the approach and code before handing over to the client.

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I maintained a long-term relationship with a European Investment Bank based in Canary Wharf. As part of a team of consultants we had repeat work to maintain and upgrade their ITAM solution. I personally delivered on a 3-week critical project to facilitate a database migration. This involved liaising with lead DBAs to extract metadata from MS SQL, PostgreSQL and Sybase databases for the solution architecture.

This was a sensitive project given the job threat to the existing DBA SMEs. I faced open hostility from one SME in particular who’s tactic was to delay providing information and not respond to emails.

I resolved this with face to face contact, without letting any request go unanswered. I also used low-level escalation to my project sponsor. This did result in a tactical complaint from the SME to the project board, however my sponsor was satisfied with my approach, hitting their 3-week deadline and no fault could be found. I resolved not to make matters personal, which is how I managed to stay focused on delivery.

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I was assigned to advise an Investment Bank in Milan in how to deploy an agent for discovery of their Mainframe systems for dependency mapping.

The solution was straightforward which involved downloading and installing an additional agent for the BMC Discovery tool. During the brief consultancy visit I also identified and advised on their general issues with credential discovery. They had had a cyber-attack the previous year and as a precaution had altered all Linux servers to have individual named service accounts – over an estate of (IIRC) 500 Linux servers.

It was pointed out that whilst this would certainly slow down a hacker and limit the the damage, it would also be more difficult to trace and manage in the event of an attack. A much better solution was suggested of proactive management and linking service accounts to an AD service with monitoring and least privilege.

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