CP Coleton Powell

Available for new roles

Engineering resilient infrastructure, and defending what runs on it.

Security-focused IT infrastructure & operations professional with 7+ years of enterprise experience across manufacturing and distributed organizations. I turn complex technical risk into business-aligned outcomes: collaborating across teams, engaging stakeholders, and keeping critical systems running.

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7+ Years enterprise IT
2,500+ Users on AD I designed
250+ Sites supported
95%+ Service satisfaction
01 · Focus

Core competencies

Where security, infrastructure, and operations meet.

Security & Risk

  • Cybersecurity & Incident Response
  • Identity & Access Management: AD / Azure AD / MFA
  • Vulnerability Management
  • Security Hardening & Endpoint Protection
  • Risk Assessment & Compliance
  • Disaster Recovery & Business Continuity

Infrastructure & Delivery

  • Enterprise Infrastructure & Virtualization
  • ITSM & RMM: NinjaOne, osTicket
  • Automation: Python, Bash
  • Sales Engineering & Pre-Sales Technical Support
  • Stakeholder Communication & Vendor Management
  • SLA-Driven Service Delivery
02 · Experience

Professional experience

Enterprise roles spanning security ownership, infrastructure, and service delivery.

Alton Steel Inc.

Alton, IL

Nov 2023 – Jan 2026

Role ended when the facility ceased operations.

Systems Administrator

  • Served as primary security owner for a multi-million-dollar steel manufacturing environment: endpoint protection, access control enforcement, and incident response across enterprise and industrial systems.
  • Coordinated post-ransomware recovery: ran forensic assessment, rebuilt affected systems, and implemented layered controls (improved monitoring, RBAC enforcement, tighter network segmentation) to prevent recurrence.
  • Engineered hybrid identity & access management on on-prem Active Directory, enforcing role-based access controls and MFA (Duo) org-wide.
  • Deployed and administered NinjaOne RMM/ITSM: enterprise patch governance, vulnerability remediation workflows, asset inventory, and SLA-driven delivery.
  • Contributed to the virtualization migration from VMware to Scale Computing, reducing attack surface and operational cost while improving resilience.
  • Built Python & Bash automation to streamline security operations and enforce consistent configuration standards at scale.

Prairie Farms Dairy

Edwardsville, IL

Jan 2021 – Nov 2023

Lead Help Desk Technician

Jan 2022 – Nov 2023

  • Led a team of 4 supporting 250+ distributed locations, lifting service satisfaction past 95% through structured SLA management and QA.
  • Designed and deployed an enterprise Active Directory domain for 2,500+ users: centralized identity governance, group policy, and access controls foundational to security posture.
  • Implemented osTicket ITSM across locations, standardizing incident and request management with audit-ready records.
  • Reduced helpdesk ticket volume 20% via SOPs, end-user training, and a structured knowledge base.
  • Partnered directly with executive leadership to align IT service delivery with business objectives.

IT Help Desk Associate

Jan 2021 – Jan 2022

  • Delivered Tier 1 and Tier 2 support across Active Directory, enterprise applications, and endpoint hardware in a high-volume environment.
  • Assisted in the design and documentation of AD infrastructure, shaping identity and access foundations later scaled across the enterprise.
  • Supported onboarding, training, and process standardization to accelerate team capability and consistency.

QPSI

Edwardsville, IL

Jun 2017 – Jan 2021

Cloud Specialist Intern

  • Digitized and migrated 20 years of QA documentation to cloud and on-prem systems, improving data governance, accessibility, and compliance posture.
  • Redesigned data-handling workflows with leadership, cutting retrieval time and establishing compliant retention practices.
03 · Approach

How I work

Translating technical risk into business-aligned outcomes.

01

Security first

Every system is something to defend. Layered controls, identity governance, and incident readiness are built into operations, not bolted on afterward.

02

Business aligned

I translate complex technical risk into language stakeholders, vendors, and customers act on: the same skill behind pre-sales discovery, solution design, and technical demos.

03

People & process

Work shoulder-to-shoulder with teams, standardize with SOPs and ITSM, and remove noise so the work scales without sacrificing service quality.

04 · Lab

Lab & Research

Self-hosted infrastructure where I prototype, break, and harden: security and AI in practice.

Local LLM Infrastructure

  • Dedicated hardware running large language model inference entirely on-premises: prompts, data, and telemetry never leave the network.
  • Air-gapped by design, with no external API dependency and no reliance on third-party model providers.
  • Proves out data sovereignty: sensitive workloads stay fully under local control without giving up modern AI capability.

AI-Assisted Log Analysis

  • Feeds structured log and alert output into a local AI pipeline that summarizes anomalies and groups related events.
  • Cuts through alert noise so genuine signals surface faster, replacing manual log-trawling with at-a-glance summaries.
  • Shortens the path from raw telemetry to an actionable picture, accelerating triage and response.

Automated Threat Intelligence

  • Pulls from public IOC feeds, then enriches and correlates indicators into prioritized, analyst-ready summaries.
  • Simulates real SOC threat-intel workflows end to end: collection, enrichment, and reporting.
  • Turns raw feeds into context, surfacing what's worth acting on instead of a flood of indicators.

Network Segmentation Lab

  • Isolated VLANs, firewall policy, and managed switching carve the environment into distinct trust zones.
  • Built on zero-trust principles: nothing is trusted by default, and every crossing between zones is policy-controlled.
  • Contains lateral movement and shrinks blast radius, so a compromise in one zone never becomes a foothold everywhere.

Local File Server & Media Stack

  • Headless file and media serving with all traffic routed through an enforced VPN tunnel.
  • Managed remotely over RDP and SSH, with services delivered as isolated, reproducible containers.
  • Demonstrates secure, self-hosted delivery: private storage and streaming without exposing the host.

Monitoring & Automation

  • Dashboards track uptime, performance, and infrastructure health across the environment at a glance.
  • Python and PowerShell scripts automate routine tasks, enforcing consistency and removing manual toil.
  • Surfaces problems before they escalate, keeping the lab observable and largely self-maintaining.

05 · Contact

Let's build what's next.

Looking for a sales engineer, or someone to own security operations and infrastructure? I'd love to connect.

coleton@coletonpowell.com LinkedIn ↗