Rod Andes, CISSP, CCISO, CGEIT

The Minimum Viable Company (MVC) framework is a resilience-first process designed to safeguard an organization’s most critical systems and data, ensuring a clean, rapid recovery from cyber incidents that would otherwise paralyze operations for weeks.

Where a traditional Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan focuses on restoring systems after predictable failures of the past, MVC is built for today’s threat landscape—one defined by sophisticated adversaries capable of… Show more

The Minimum Viable Company (MVC) framework is a resilience-first process designed to safeguard an organization’s most critical systems and data, ensuring a clean, rapid recovery from cyber incidents that would otherwise paralyze operations for weeks.

Where a traditional Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR) plan focuses on restoring systems after predictable failures of the past, MVC is built for today’s threat landscape—one defined by sophisticated adversaries capable of destroying backups, corrupting infrastructures, and disrupting every layer of digital operations.

MVC enables continuity of essential business functions even when the underlying technology environment has been compromised. It transforms chaos into control—allowing organizations not merely to recover, but to remain operational amid the very events that would have once brought them down. Show less

Direct collaboration with Cisco’s innovation team to test SDS solutions and develop their build-vs-buy strategy when developing Cisco’s HCI offering.

A leading lending origination software company needed SaaS to meet its client’s requirements. I built the first SaaS for the lending industry meeting customer, compliance and security requirements.

A credit card processor in central Florida, had an issue meeting growing processing demands during the holiday season. Re-engineering their storage for SQL optimization allowed them to get through Black Friday without an incident. They were also able to increase their customer base by 300% without adding more hardware.

I saved a large hotel chain over $1M a year in VMware licensing by revamping and upgrading their datacenter standards and how virtual infrastructures were built.

While consulting with a large metro government I defined and brought to the table an enterprise level Backup/DR/Data Protection solution that allows them to have in place the data protection infrastructure that will prevent them from being held hostage by ransomware as many other municipalities currently are.

I was retained by the CIO of a large pharmaceutical management group to review a plan for a datacenter refresh and provide my input. I identified and corrected an internal bias meant to point to certain vendors, instead of the best solution. My Gap Analysis led to the formulation of a solution that encompassed all aspects of Datacenter, Networking, Application, and Security (both Cyber and Risk Management). The result was a comprehensive plan that was presentation quality for submission to the… Show more

I was retained by the CIO of a large pharmaceutical management group to review a plan for a datacenter refresh and provide my input. I identified and corrected an internal bias meant to point to certain vendors, instead of the best solution. My Gap Analysis led to the formulation of a solution that encompassed all aspects of Datacenter, Networking, Application, and Security (both Cyber and Risk Management). The result was a comprehensive plan that was presentation quality for submission to the board and forward thinking to prevent the need for unforeseen incremental spend. Show less

Led the consolidation of two entire datacenters for a petroleum trading company then moved the entire IT operation to Houston with an accumulated downtime of only 2 hours during which the VMs were rebooted and new IPs added.

While consulting with a large holding company about purchasing an all flash array we were able to identify and resolve a major issue that was preventing them from virtualizing an Oracle database. After hiring two consulting companies to identify the issue limiting application speed they still could not identify and resolve the issue. While working on a Proof of Concept I was able to identify that the application was single threaded thus limiting the use of CPU cores in the virtual machine. The… Show more

While consulting with a large holding company about purchasing an all flash array we were able to identify and resolve a major issue that was preventing them from virtualizing an Oracle database. After hiring two consulting companies to identify the issue limiting application speed they still could not identify and resolve the issue. While working on a Proof of Concept I was able to identify that the application was single threaded thus limiting the use of CPU cores in the virtual machine. The physical host had 3.5GHz CPU cores while the virtual host had 2.2GHz CPUs. Moving the app to a host that was better suited for the solution solved the issue. Show less

Advised a major international hospitality chain to understand their on-prem server requirements thus revising its corporate standards. This move will save them millions each year in hardware replacement and software licensing.

As a leading Hyper-Converged architect, I have written several papers and worked closely with HCI vendors to develop and expand their offerings, such as stretched clusters and automated DR solutions.

Using cost effective, commercially available equipment, I have built affordable solutions that have allowed small to medium businesses and local government entities the ability to overcome malicious attacks and ransomware in a matter of just a few hours without the need to pay a ransom or deal with massive outages.

I designed and wrote he document that defined the process of Stretched Clusters for Simplivity

I moved a petroleum trading company from Nashville, TN to Houston, TX without production downtime. This included moving hardware.

While consulting with a large holding company in Chicago that was about to purchase an all flash array, I was able to identify and resolve a major issue that was preventing them from virtualizing their Oracle database. They had previously hired two separate consulting companies to identify the issue that was limiting their applications speed. These consultants still could not identify and resolve the issue. While working on a Proof of Concept for flash storage I was able to identify that the… Show more

While consulting with a large holding company in Chicago that was about to purchase an all flash array, I was able to identify and resolve a major issue that was preventing them from virtualizing their Oracle database. They had previously hired two separate consulting companies to identify the issue that was limiting their applications speed. These consultants still could not identify and resolve the issue. While working on a Proof of Concept for flash storage I was able to identify that the application was single threaded thus limiting the use of CPU cores in the virtual machine. Show less