Samuel Waters
Summary
A visionary and strategic technology executive with over 5 years of leadership experience, driving digital transformation and innovation for a multi-site law firm. Proven success in aligning technology with business goals, orchestrating multi-million dollar budgets, and pioneering firm-wide adoption of emerging technologies like AI. Expertise in cloud architecture, cybersecurity, and building high-performing teams to drive organizational success.
Key Achievements
- Strategic Technology Leadership: Drove digital transformation by architecting and executing a multi-year technology roadmap, resulting in a more agile and scalable infrastructure.
- Cost-Effective Modernization: Realized significant cost savings by championing the replacement of legacy MPLS with a high-speed fiber and SD-WAN solution, increasing inter-office WAN performance and collaboration efficiency for 15 offices.
- AI Innovation & Adoption: Increased productivity and efficiency by pioneering the firm's adoption of AI, leading the training and deployment of Microsoft CoPilot and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel/WestLaw Next.
- Enhanced Security Posture: Reduced risk and improved compliance by governing a full security stack overhaul, implementing Fortigate firewalls, ZTNA, and deploying CrowdStrike for advanced endpoint protection.
- Business Continuity & Disaster Recovery: Ensured business continuity and minimized downtime by commanding the successful execution of the firm's Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) plan during Hurricane Ian, resulting in zero data loss.
Professional Experience
WICKER, SMITH, O'HARA, MCCOY & FORD P.A., Tampa, FL
Director of Information Technology (approx. 2020 - Present)
Led all aspects of IT operations, infrastructure, and security for a prominent multi-site law firm, managing a multi-million dollar budget and directing a team of 6 specialists. Partnered with the CIO and senior leadership to develop and execute technology roadmaps aligned with firm-wide strategic goals.
- Strategic Technology Leadership:
- Drove digital transformation by architecting and executing a multi-year technology roadmap to overhaul all systems and networking gear, resulting in a more agile and scalable infrastructure.
- Increased productivity and efficiency by pioneering the firm's adoption of AI, leading the training and deployment of Microsoft CoPilot and Thomson Reuters CoCounsel/WestLaw Next.
- Realized significant cost savings by orchestrating a transition to a new SOC and firewall vendor, enhancing the firm's security toolkit with market-leading products like CrowdStrike.
- Infrastructure & Operations:
- Realized significant cost savings and increased inter-office WAN performance by championing the replacement of legacy MPLS with a high-speed fiber and SD-WAN solution.
- Ensured business continuity and minimized downtime by commanding the successful execution of the firm's Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity (BC) plan during Hurricane Ian, resulting in zero data loss.
- Improved operational efficiency and reduced deployment time by engineering a zero-touch Windows deployment strategy, reducing the base image size by 60% (from 40GB to 16GB).
- Security & Compliance:
- Reduced risk and improved compliance by governing a full security stack overhaul, implementing Fortigate firewalls, ZTNA, and deploying CrowdStrike for advanced endpoint protection.
- Strengthened identity and access management by guiding the migration of Duo MFA from on-premise to the cloud, integrated with SSO, and configured Conditional Access policies in a Hybrid Azure AD environment.
Team Lead & Project Coordinator / Network Engineer (2018 - approx. 2020)
- Supervised IT team members, managed the full lifecycle of IT infrastructure projects, and implemented and maintained network security measures, including migrations (Exchange to O365, Xen to Hyper-V) and SAN storage management (NetApp, Nimble).
Technical Proficiencies
- Strategy & Management: IT Roadmapping, Budget Management, Vendor Negotiation, Team Leadership
- Security: Fortigate (Firewall, ZTNA), CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, SOC/SIEM Management, GPO Hardening
- Cloud & Identity: Azure AD, Office 365, Duo (MFA, SSO, Cloud Migration), Conditional Access
- Infrastructure: Pure Storage, Dell & HPE Nimble SANs, Hyper-V, VMware, Windows Server
- Networking: SD-WAN (Aruba, Fortigate), Cisco Switching, VLANs, Fiber/Broadband WAN
- Automation & Deployment: PowerShell, Zero-Touch Imaging, RMM/Monitoring Tools
Education and Certifications
Master of Business Administration (MBA), Cybersecurity Emphasis (In Progress, Expected Dec 2026)
University of West Florida - Pensacola, FL
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Biomedical Sciences/Public Health (Cum Laude)
University of South Florida - Tampa, FL
Microsoft 365 Identity and Services Certification (MS 100), 2020
Certified Meraki Networking Associate (CMNA), 2019