Jay A. Cohen

EXECUTIVE BACKGROUND

Mr. Cohen is a successful IT Strategist with over 25 years of experience, skilled at leading the development, deployment, and support of robust technical solutions, systems administrations, and architectures across multiple industries and platforms. Industries include technology, finance, real estate, healthcare, government contracting, and telecommunication services. Offering a unique combination of strategic technology vision, business acumen, and tactical leadership to deliver to plan and bring value to the organization consistently.

Lead System Administration – Over 20 years in system administration, leading teams and mentoring Jr. Administrators and improving overall quality and performance through shell scripting, creating tools to monitor and check the health of the systems, and setting up SLAs and career path training programs.

Change Management Process (Human Side) – Working with end users to educate them and help them understand new changes and setting up a transparent process so that everyone knows what is happening.

Enterprise Systems Innovation– Mr. Cohen has a track record for implementing cutting-edge solutions that solve business issues while controlling costs and risk; advanced knowledge in Cloud and virtualization architectures and Enterprise-wide initiatives.

Cloud Architecture – With a Proven track record in designing / Implementing and Monitoring cloud technologies on both VMWare and Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Technology Services Expertise- across multiple industries, and understand the various lines of business, system requirements, compliance, and regulations—strong technical background in infrastructure technologies and planning.

Project Management (PM) / Project Management Organization (PMO) – Solid foundation of project initiation, planning, budgeting, monitoring, configuration management, risk identification, verification, testing, and remediation with a strong emphasis on coordination and reporting skills. Planned projects over 3 Million dollars.

People Management- Mr. Cohen is a motivating leader who has built, developed, and managed high-performing IT teams. Practical interpersonal skills with an ability to create a strong partnership with stakeholders. Ability to work with internal technical resources and cross-organizational departments and business lines.

Business Analyst- Documentation and business requirement skills, advanced analysis skills across all integrated Oracle modules and partner interfaces. Ability to perform and document complex data analysis across multiple system platforms.

Software Development – Understand software development and the SLDC process clearly. Mr. Cohen has worked alongside and with development in object-oriented Java development and has personal experience in Objective C and Swift development for iPhone applications.

Expertise in – Strategic IT planning; enterprise, data center, virtualization architectures; risk and cost controls; Harvesting relationships and customer management; change management; quality management; staff development and leadership; project management; solution testing, resource, and management.

Accomplished Speaker – Presentation and Speaking skills. He has given lectures on cloud computing and its benefits for small businesses.  

Board of Directors – Mr. Cohen has been on the board of directors of BalletNova School of Dance in Falls Church, Virginia, and Springfield Community Theatre.

KEY STRENGTHS AND HIGHLIGHTS

Entrepreneurship 100%
Venture Capital 90%
Start-Ups 100%
Strategy 100%
Information Technology 100%
Emerging Technologies 100%

Major Projects

Current Projects

Past Projects

  • Shadowbox Consulting Associates, Annandale Virginia – vCIO, Corporate Migration to the Cloud (ongoing since 2010)
  • Nextel Corporation, Herndon Virginia – Created Tier 3 Help Desk 
    Created Tier 3 Help Desk for the industry’s first Cellphone Connected Wireless Web Portal. Responsibilities included but were not limited to:

Managed a budget of over 10 Million annually, Staffing, Negotiating Service Level Agreements, and Managing the staff in a 24×7 production environment. 

  • Coventry Healthcare, Rockville, Maryland – Moved Primary Data Center from Rockville, Maryland to Cranberry Township, Pennsylvania

The project was to consolidate 3 data centers into one. In addition, there was a technology refresh to upgrade the claims servers. The server refresh saved the company over 3.3 Million dollars. 

  • Fannie Mae, Herndon Virginia – Rehosted 3900 Servers in 12 months.

Upgraded 3900 servers for the entire enterprise from SLES 10 to SLES 11. Interfaced with stakeholders across the entire enterprise, working closely with IBM Professional Services to automate the upgrades to decrease the downtime and server build from 8 hours to 2 per server   

  • Fannie Mae, Reston Virginia – Technology refresh of Enterprise Class SAN server

Fannie Mae had moved their Enterprise SAN server from EMC to IBM, which has many issues. Mr. Cohen worked on the team to move the Enterprise Server back to the EMC servers from IBM. 

  • CGI Group, Sterling Virginia – Installed Commvault backup for 6400 consultant laptops Nationwide

CGI is one of the largest consulting companies and had 6400 consultants in the US working on company laptops without anything getting back up.  We rolled out Commvault Backup so every consultant laptop would be backed up once it connected to the internet. 

  • CGI Group, Sterling Virginia – Upgraded Active Directory Servers and Consolidated servers from overseas.

Consolidated servers in Germany and Poland and upgraded the AD servers in the US. All while working with the Canadian HQ to grant access to having the US team maintain their network. 

EXPERIENCE SNAPSHOT

    • Financial
    • Real Estate
    • Healthcare
    • Telecommunications
    • Government Contracting

TECHNICAL SPECIALIZATIONS

    • Fractional CIO
    • Unix Systems Administration
    • Project Management
    • Cloud Services / Architecture
    • Infrastructure Management
    • iOS Development

MANAGEMENT HIGHLIGHTS

    • Large scale procurements
    • Large enterprise cost-saving measures
    • Effective management of large teams
    • Deployed a wide range of applications across multiple Platforms
    • Enterprise-wide migrations
    • Over 25 years of experience working in Production Environments

Thought Leadership

Speaking Engagements

  • Webinar for The University of Central Florida, Incubator March 2023 “7 Pitfalls of IT for Small Businesses”
  • Seminar for the Small Business Development Center @ UCF in Sumter County  “Cybersecurity Awareness (coming in October)
  • Society of CPAs, Northern Virginia Chapter December 2011, where Mr. Cohen gave a speech on How to Select a Cloud Computing Company
  • South African Government 2007 Premier of the Eastern Province Speech on Black Empowerment and Development

Blog

Articles

Orlando Medical News “Security for Remote Access to Keep People Working” April 2020

Orlando Business Journal “New Sec Rules Force Fast Turnaround On Hack Disclosures. Orlando Experts Say 4 Days Is Not Enough Time.” August 4, 2023

Orlando Business Journal “Data Breaches The New Normal. Here’s How Local Firms Can Protect Themselves.” July 19, 2023

Orlando Business Journal “Orlando Cybersecurity Experts Weigh In On Growing Problem After Major Health Care Data Breach,” July 17, 2023

Book

“Cloud Computing for Every Business”


Cloud Computing for Every Business book cover