Patrick Forristal

Continued supporting the FDIC under the new contract with SAIC, focusing on repository hygiene to reduce security findings and improve code quality. Built AI-assisted tools to accelerate project velocity, including automated VM image creation and container image ingestion processes for COTS and baseline images.

Acted as a facilitator to promote cross-team collaboration for rapid resolution and better support to workload teams. Developed training guidelines to establish a common knowledge foundation, implemented baseline monitoring leveraging Azure Monitor, and created Splunk dashboards to reduce outage resolution times. Worked closely with event management to build automated Service-Now workflows for incident tracking, built test workloads in Terraform to deepen team understanding of resource consumption, and mentored team members while resolving long-standing performance issues.

Working on Cloud Tools and Automation to improve automation and accelerate delivery. Using CI/CD tools like GitHub, Azure DevOps, and Octopus Deploy to migrate legacy deployments to fully integrated "Everything as Code".

After JLL acquired HFF, I was brought over to plan, migrate, integrate, and consolidate systems between the two firms. This process took considerable time and effort to achieve a smooth transition over a thousand users, and several hundred terabytes of data to the new systems, including migrating file shares to Azure File Shares, and moving mail between Office 365 tenants.

This role involved working with my fellow architects to design and plan future projects, including being flexible enough to incorporate new and emerging technologies when the need arose. Some of these projects have included migrating around a thousand users to Office 365, deploying SD-WAN to improve resiliency at remote offices, and moving datacenters to improve redundancy.

The first part of my career at HFF involved maintaining and expanding a Hyper-V environment, and migrating several core line of business applications from physical hardware to virtual machines, increasing availability and resiliency. Other major projects included replacing aging firewalls with new layer 7 firewalls, developing scripts to decrease delivery time and errors while increasing repeatability, migrating from digital phones to VoIP, and improving backup integrity by leveraging new technologies.

Working in a non-profit academic environment pushed the envelope of stretching a budget, from leveraging open source projects to pioneering with virtualization to better utilize capital investments in hardware. We were expected to do more with less, and do everything from handle audio/visual needs to redesigning the network infrastructure to better handle new and challenging technologies. Working in such a crucible of needs really allowed me to become a true jack of all trades, and launch my career further.