Kenneth Balich, CISSP, CCNA

As Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture, I led a team responsible for defining and implementing the architectural vision and strategy for the Zelle Payment Network. Leveraging my strong leadership skills, I provided guidance and direction to architects and stakeholders across multiple business units to ensure alignment with business objectives and IT strategy working with a 60M annual budget.

In this role, I oversaw the creation and maintenance of architectural artifacts, including principles, standards, and guidelines, to support consistent and effective decision-making throughout the enterprise. I established and chaired the Architectural Review Board, facilitating cross-functional collaboration and ensuring that proposed solutions adhered to architectural principles and standards.

My responsibilities included:

• Driving design decisions that balanced business needs
• Technical feasibility
• Architectural integrity. 

Security and high availability were paramount concerns in my role, and I worked closely with security and operations teams to integrate robust security measures and ensure the availability and reliability of critical systems and services. I conducted risk assessments and implemented governance mechanisms to mitigate architectural risks and ensure compliance with regulatory requirements.

Overall, my tenure as Senior Director of Enterprise Architecture was characterized by strategic leadership, effective governance, and a relentless focus on driving architectural excellence to support the organization's growth and success.

Hired on to design and lead transformation of the Network and Systems Engineering departments from traditional equipment and processes to Next-Gen network and SaaS services.  Work with department leaders to determine site by site needs.  Perform a major tech debt consolidation effort and remove waste and deprecated equipment.  Lead Chicago site relocation efforts, combining two locations into single location.  Control move budget of $2M and an IT expense budget of $6M.

- Redesigned LAN network interconnecting 58 sites by engineering and implementing a cloud-based SD-WAN managed network solution, including creating a mesh network to absorb failures in WAN transport for continuing connectivity.

• Manage teams site surveys for design and requirement gathering
• Full project/plan documentation and diagrams
• Ensure configuration and port standardization across the sites
• Consistent BOM template for ordering accuracy

- Introduce DR and BC Plans to reduce RTO/RPO and risk

- Implemented regional network services compute stacks to increase performance of DNS, DHCP and AD lookups.

- Designing and managing transition from standard x386 VMWare environment to an HCI hybrid cloud solution utilizing cloud services out of AWS.

Promoted to lead company and IT staff in enterprise-wide IT strategy.  Partner with department leaders to identify and deploy business solutions.  Control IT expenses and corporate IT budget of $3M.  Negotiate all vendor contracts (hardware, software, telco and support) for real time transactional production environment and corporate user support systems.  Maintain a cohesive relationship between users and IT Staff.  Design and lead network infrastructure, creation of policies, processes and procedures, service agreement, IT staff training and support.  Research and direct emerging technology implementations, conversion migration and upgrading.

Revamped the Corp Systems Departments network procedures and policies.  As well as build solid teams of Technicians, Sys Admins and Engineers in Scottsdale, Chicago and San Francisco. 

Managing the authentication risk engine build out in Amazon Web Services.

• Extending existing AD Domain into AWS
• Managing TerraForm and Bamboo admin for automated Windows Server deployment
• Hardening procedures
• Global Load Balancing (AWS East/West) via Akamai and Route 53

 - Ensured a 99.99% uptime for high profile banking, finance and e-commerce customers. 

- Implemented SOC2 annual audit process to comply with stringent bank, financial institutes, and ecommerce security requirements

- Grew network through design and research from handling thousands of real time transactions per month to millions of transactions per month.

- Established a reward and recognition program for IT staff achieving certifications in relevant technology.