Ben Force
In my current role, I work closely with a small team of DevSecOps Assurance Experts to integrate automated security solutions into our CICD pipelines. This permits me to deepen my security expertise while also allowing me to crossover into cloud engineering and focus on Developer Experience, two areas I'm deeply passionate about.
More recently, I dedicated significant time to enhancing my company's ServiceNow Service Portal. I take pride in having both personally conducted the user research and performed the ServiceNow development. This was an interesting detour in my career that game me new perspective on the platform capabilities and underlying architecture.
I possess a deep understanding of AWS and its best practices, having played a crucial engineering role in the early stages of our enterprise cloud transformation program. This experience introduced me to modern infrastructure management concepts such as IAC, CICD, cloud operating model, GitOps, and containerized workloads. I've also spent significant time as an engineer on the Horizon and Workspace ONE paltforms.
As evident, I have held various IT roles and have developed the ability and reputation of being able to quickly learn new technology domains.
In my personal life, I have been happily married for several years to a wonderful woman I met on my first day at Vanguard. We have an adorably goofy dog. I am also a home automation enthusiast working with the Home Assistant platform, a retro video game fanatic, and a passionate cook with a New Year's resolution to create two new dinners every week.
Experience
The Vanguard Group
DevSecOps Assurance Expert | Global Enterprise Security
March 2023 — Present
Implement and audit automated security controls in modern CICD pipelines.
The Vanguard Group
Solutions Consultant | Workplace Experience and Architecture
February 2022 — March 2023
Drove employee experience by reducing friction in everyday employee tasks using data driven and user experience research methodologies.
Designed and deployed fixes for 85% of negative feedback submitted through employee Service Portal.
Lead UX “password reset” case study identifying why password reset incidents have increased by 25% over the course of the pandemic without returning to normal levels.
Implemented fixes for 4 of 11 findings of password reset case study.
Facilitated discussions with key stakeholders on industry-standard self-service password reset capabilities,
The Vanguard Group
Senior Platform Engineer | End User Computing
April 2019 — February 2022
Engineered and maintained VMware Anywhere Workspace Platform, consisting of a variety virtual desktop use cases and over 10,000 corporate and BYOD mobile devices.
Improved VDI delivery process, reducing lead time by 22% while increasing volumes by 300%.
Developed ServiceNow solutions for Workspace One in response to global pandemic business needs.
Maintained business continuity and adapted workflows for a hybrid workforce during the pandemic.
Implemented infrastructure health checking using Splunk and PagerDuty APIs.
Researched opportunities to enable new use cases by evaluating emerging cloud-based virtual workspace products such as VMware on AWS, AWS WorkSpaces, and Horizon on Azure.
The Vanguard Group
Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure Engineer | Chief Technology Office
September 2016 — April 2019
Engineered and maintained designs for critical hybrid cloud services such as DNS, NTP, Active Directory, network peering, routing, and Palo Alto internet egress using python and CloudFormation in a large AWS Organization.
Created Bamboo CICD build and deployment specs in Java and YAML to support automated “one-click” infrastructure deployments.
Wrote AWS CloudFormation infrastructure for deployment through Bamboo pipeline.
Determined system KPIs of critical infrastructure components. Leveraged ASWS CloudWatch metrics, CloudWatch logs, and on-prem data to measure system performance.
Developed Python Lambda functions to aggregate data across a multi-account environment.
Mentored COTS FinTech product teams during their cloud transformation journey.
The Vanguard Group
Systems Operations Analyst | Global Technology Office
May 2014 — September 2016
Performed system administration for over 5000 Windows servers in a global, highly available, distributed, and clustered environment. Maintained Windows Server on bare metal, ESXI, Hyper-V. Participated in ITIL incident management at the hardware and OS level by conducting initial triage, root cause analysis, and realted break/fix scenarios.
Managed enterprise fileshare and home drives for over 15,000 clients as primary engineer and administrator.
Migrated a large FTP environment from IIS 6/7 to 8.
Implemented Splunk monitoring of IIS logs for assistance in incident management and traffic monitoring.
Decreased MTTD of incidents related to service account lockouts by > 90% by implementing account lockout alerts.
Automated routine job functions using PowerShell utilities.
The Vanguard Group
Software Testing Administrator | Corporate Strategy
July 2012 — May 2014
Managed annual testing activities for investment reporting programs and new in-house applications.
Collaborated with business representatives, developers, and DBAs on requirements and application design.
Supported mutual fund reporting teams by training on tools and processes to improve testing standards.
Lead DMAIC initiative to reform CAT Test Readiness Review process.
Education
Penn State
Master of Science, Information Science
2011 — 2014
Temple University
Bachelor of Arts, Communication and Media Studies
2000 — 2005
Projects
mister-hassio
mister-hassio is written in python and creates an integration between The MiSTer retro game console running on a DE-10 nano and an installation of Home Assistant. This allows a user to display Mister FPGA information in their Home Assistant dashboards. To my knowledge, there is nobody silly enough to do this... so I did.
s3plus
s3plus is CloudFormation for the infrastructure that manages a lowcost secure static website (including this site). This site is hosted in S3 and distributed over CloudFront CDN. It uses an AWS CodePipeline to deploy content updates to a development bucket. After a review stage in the pipeline, the updates will be promoted to a production bucket.
Associations
American Red Cross
Site Lead and Frequent Donor
2017 — Present
I'm the site lead for the Arizona chapter of The Vanguard Group's blood drive program, organizing multiple drives each year across our Scottsdale campus resulting in several hundred donations. Additionly, I have personally donated over 50 pints of blood and platelets over the last 20 years.
Certifications
Social Links
- Github: https://github.com/theRealBenForce
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/theRealBenForce