Curriculum Vitae

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Mark Andrew Cole

730 Denison House, 20 Lanterns Way, London, E14 9JL.

Tel: +44 (0) 7506261265

Email: mark@markcole.co.uk

Summary

I am a motivated and skilled infrastructure technologist who combines technical skills with business understanding. My current role is as a technology associate at Morgan Stanley, having completed their Technology Analyst Programme graduate scheme. My role in the firm, as part of the Desktop Level 3 team, is to manage and support over 160,000 desktop computers that 80,000 people from across the world rely on every day. In previous years, I have interned twice at the firm. Firstly in the *NIX Operations team and then again in the Unified Communications Operations team.

I graduated from the University of Southampton with a first class honours degree in Web Science. This is a modern and interdisciplinary subject which combines computer science and social science subjects such as economics, politics and sociology. While I was at Southampton, I was a trustee of our Student’s Union, SUSU. This meant I was involved in key decision making and the strategic vision for an organisation with a £7 million+ turnover.

Previously, I have a wide variety of technology and business experience. This includes working at a school, a charity and founding my own IT services company.

Experience

Morgan Stanley UK Limited, Canary Wharf, London – Technology Associate August 2018 – Present

  • A member of the global Desktop Level 3 team, within the End User Technology department.
  • Part of the Configuration Infrastructure stream, using products such as Ivanti AppSense, IBM BigFix, Microsoft SCCM and our own internal tools and scripts to patch, deploy and maintain over 160,000 desktops/laptops/VMs.
  • Responsible for Apple Macintosh administration in EMEA, mainly using Jamf Pro.
  • Graduated from the intensive Technology Analyst Programme (TAP) that took place in New York City over 15 weeks. During TAP, I was voted ‘Technical Guru’ by my peers and was part of the winning project team.

Southampton University Student’s Union, Southampton – Trustee July 2016 – July 2017

  • The student body elected me to sit on the board of directors of the student’s union, an organisation with a turnover of over £7 million, as a Student Trustee. In this role, I was involved in key decision making related to strategic direction, finances, staffing and ensuring overall performance of the Students’ Union by holding the full-time officers and employees to account.

Morgan Stanley UK Limited, Canary Wharf, London – Summer Analyst June 2016 – August 2016

  • I interned in the Windows Operations team and the Unified Communications Operations team who support a global Windows Servers, Exchange and Skype for business infrastructure.
  • My main responsibility was to work as part of a global team to implement a new dashboard platform for the team’s products. The technologies leveraged included PowerShell, ASP.net, MSSQL and Bootstrap to deliver a well-designed and informative dashboard from which the health of the plant can be determined by management and support teams.
  • Other projects that I worked on included the creation of PowerShell based tools to aid the Exchange support team. This was based around a web PowerShell tool that supported the running of scripts using a web browser.

Morgan Stanley UK Limited, Canary Wharf, London – Summer Analyst June 2015 – August 2015

  • As part of a competitive internship programme, I worked in the UNIX operations team, part of the firm’s Enterprise Infrastructure division responsible for managing over 60,000 hosts.
  • One of my projects was the creation of new a process to handle root cause analysis of system crashes, in order to improve communication between UNIX operations and UNIX engineering and, therefore, customer experience.
  • The other project I was involved in used big data analysis tools such as Splunk to process and visualise compute plant hygiene data (uptime, server health, patches etc.) for presentation to management and to help quantify plant risks.
  • Also during my time in the team, I was exposed to a large enterprise infrastructure, including outage management.
  • At the end of my internship, I gave presentations of my work and ideas to peers and senior managing directors.

Information Assurance Advisory Council (IAAC) – MCM and IAAC Access Secretary June 2015 – present

  • IAAC is an influential organisation that brings together government, academia and industry to help create an information society that is open, secure and productive. IAAC is chaired by Lord Arbuthnot.
  • I am a member of the IAAC management committee (MCM), where I attend regular private discussion meetings on cyber security topics and quarterly management committee meetings handling the day to day running of IAAC.
  • More recently, I’ve been appointed by Sir Edmund to become part of the founding committee of IAAC Access. This community aims to provide events to support those in the early stages of their information assurance careers.
  • I was also invited to speak at the annual symposium in 2015 as part of a panel, chaired by Sir Chris Hurran OBE, discussing ‘the internet of things: a young person’s game?’

Cyber Security Challenge UK

  • I have represented my country as part of Team UK at the European Cyber Security Challenge held in Switzerland during October 2015 at which we came 4th against teams from Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Romania and Spain.
  • I attended the ‘Masterclass’ final of Cyber Security Challenge UK hosted by BT, Airbus group, NCA and GCHQ in London in March 2015.
    • This was held on board HMS Belfast, with a scenario based around regaining control of the fictional ship gun control system from malicious attackers. Skills used involved Linux system penetration, hardware hacking and SCADA systems.
  • As part of the final, I appeared in the national press including ITV’s Good Morning Britain and BBC news.

Fitzharrys School, Abingdon, Oxfordshire – Temporary Network Manager May 2014 – August 2014

  • I maintained a network of 700 users, 200+ PCs, 4 servers (multiple Hyper-V VMs) to cover staff shortages.
  • Technologies I supported included Windows Server 2008/2008 R2/2012, Microsoft Lync fully integrated telephony, thin clients (Microsoft RDS and Citrix VDI-in-a-Box), Aerohive wireless, Papercut printing and PRTG network monitor.
  • I was also in control of £10,000s of new IT spending such as laptops and projectors through tender.
  • A large project that I managed was a move to Microsoft Office 365 from a legacy county council provided email system.

Viva – Together for the children, Oxford – Volunteer IT Technician September 2012 – May 2014

  • As a volunteer, I assisted with general system diagnosis and installation to support the work of an international charity.
  • During my time at Viva, I installed several new systems (various servers, WiFi, internet printing) and managed a small Windows 7 based network using Windows Server 2012 Essentials.

Yellow Cube Solutions Partnership – Partner  November 2011 – January 2014

  • I cofounded a small IT services company, offering services to clients such as VOIP, web hosting and virtualization with clients from all over the world including the UK, China and Canada.
  • Some of the major projects I was involved in include a large Linux based web hosting solution for an e-commerce application, two-factor authentication deployments and a Windows IIS based web farm.
  • In 2014 Yellow Cube Solutions was acquired by another IT services company.

Sophos Limited, Abingdon, Oxfordshire – School Work Experience April 2011

  • My main task was the creation of new Python build-scripts for Sophos anti-virus engine.
  • Another project that I completed was the creation of source code analysis scripts to analyse the quality of the code in the anti-virus engine.

Education/Qualifications

University of Southampton – Web Science (Computer Science) BSc 2014 – 2017

  • Final Grade: First Class Honors
  • Dissertation title: An investigation into the regulatory response to risks presented by High Frequency Trading: A case study on the 2010 Flash Crash
  • As part of my interdisciplinary degree, I studied modules from the departments of Computer Science, Economics, Finance, Maths and Sociology.
  • Throughout my course I was a representative of Web Science students, resolving student concerns with academic staff.

Fitzharrys School 2007 – 2014

  • A Levels: Economics A, Mathematics B, Physics B.
  • AS Levels: Further Mathematics, General Studies and Chemistry.
  • 10 GCSEs: 2A*s, 5As and 3Bs including English and Maths.

Other qualifications

  • Microsoft MCP and MSCA (Windows 10) – August 2018.
  • CompTIA Security+ certification – June 2015
  • Senior Mathematics Challenge, Bronze award – 2012
  • Full clean UK class B manual car driving licence – November 2013

References

  • Available on request