Christopher Smith

As the Museum’s top technology and cybersecurity executive, I lead enterprise-wide strategy across IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, digital transformation, and vendor management. My focus is aligning scalable, secure, and future-ready technologies with the Museum’s 10-year strategic plan and mission to educate and inspire. • Defined and executed a 5-year tech roadmap accelerating infrastructure and security initiatives by 2 years. • Built and led the Museum’s first enterprise cybersecurity program with CrowdStrike Identity and Darktrace (HEAL, Network, Response, Identity, and AI Simulations). • Modernized hybrid cloud architecture using Azure and AWS, reducing OpEx by 30%. • Deployed Fortinet HA firewalls, MCLAG, and FortiSwitch fabric, achieving 99.99% uptime and Zero Trust segmentation. • Directed AV modernization to support hybrid education, executive collaboration, and digital events. • Negotiated vendor contracts during tariff hikes, reducing IT lifecycle costs by 22%. • Led migration of high-value Collections and Archives to secure offsite access for researchers. • Launched organization-wide security awareness and classification policies; achieved 100% phishing sim participation. • Improved IT Helpdesk SLA response by 35% and cut onboarding times in half via workflow automation. • Manage a $2M+ annual technology budget with full CapEx/OpEx oversight and executive reporting.

* Direct and develop a strategic IT department supporting 4 regions. * Manage network infrastructure, desktop support, quality assurance, operational realignment, documentation and telecommunications. * Create standardization between locations, implement a helpdesk system and work with HR to establish processes to streamline onboarding of users. * Introduce standards and develop SOPs for virtualization, budgeting and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Create a 67% reduction in production costs through new vendor selection, a 20% reduction in annual telecom spend and $100k cut in IT spend annually through enterprise-level Microsoft Licensing agreement negotiations. * Establish virtual server farm (Microsoft Azure), integration with Office365 and roll out Salesforce for SaaS and cloud migration initiatives; maintain 99.99% uptime through virtualization with support to a global 7x24x365 environment. * High priority projects and initiatives include the implementation of an eCommerce program, Christmas Production executive dashboard and the standardization of products, costing products, bills of materials and pricing, * Added company’s first IT asset management procedures and system facilitating annual CapEx planning.

* Direct IT operations in North and Latin America, lead 7 direct employees and manage a $1.7M annual budget. * Work with Talent Managers to create a team of network, systems, help desk and DevOps engineers supporting staff in Canada, United States and Latin America. * Create a ~25% reduction in spend and a savings of $300k annually by centralizing purchasing equipment and reducing multiple carrier infrastructure accounts. * Supervise workflow development and back-end office automation, re-negotiate vendor contracts, and establish and document procedures that improve internal processes and enhanced productivity. Improve visibility and workflow management resulting in improved customer satisfaction and internal morale; rebuilt relationships with regional managers, followed up with end-users to ensure satisfaction and supplied regional and corporate IT with dashboards/KPI around systems in the Americas. * Support the migration of production environments to cloud hosting (production, research and development), 24x7 application/system support, compliance, networking, IT security, budget forecast and management, application/system availability (99.5%), database and infrastructure architecture. * Migrate company from on-premise infrastructure to Office365 with full SharePoint deployment, email, instant messaging and archival of data; managed personnel expectations and build a system from nothing (no existing intranet/extranet or permissions hierarchy). * Responsible for CentOS sandbox environment with Kali Linux for penetration testing scenarios.

* Manage the information technology group and a $500k budget. * Oversee and directly manage 5 Ubuntu Servers running 25 XEN virtual servers supporting 120 global users. * Design policies, procedures and standards with business alignment to support the organization on a global scale. * Establish and implement a change management solution based on ITIL framework. * Advise on the set up of IT to support global deployment opportunities in the UK and Philippines. * Build out new data center for the servers, implement monitoring systems and a customer-centric team to address space constraints, poor reliability and negative team reputation challenges. * Hands-on support of corporate systems including Microsoft and Epicor Vantage environments.

* Architect, design and train 5 employees on the use of a Network Monitoring System (NMS). * Design and implement a Windows 2008 Active Directory environment to serve as foundation for Site-to-Site VPN traffic in conjunction with a new product. * Create virtual server structure running on CentOS.

* Manager of a $1.5M budget, 7 cross functional and skill specific engineers and an offshore technical team. * Lead comprehensive daily IT operations management encompassing strategic planning, policy development and workflow prioritization. * Orchestrate the design and development of all computing, networking and telecommunications infrastructure creating a $100k decrease in annual expenditures, a 15% decrease in operational overhead and a $500k+ decrease in annual department costs. * Project Manager for system implementations and equipment upgrades; maintained 100% uptime and high-level customer service while delivering ~$250K under budget during a $3M Oracle Applications migration and deployment project. * Intuitive ERP conversion to Oracle e-Business. * Define and create disaster recovery and business continuity plans. * Develop and oversee RedHat, CentOS and SuSE infrastructures for IT and R&D. * Supervise 20 software developers in India running SuSE and versioning systems.