Nate Walker

Cybersecurity & IT Leadership — SF Bay Area

About

I build secure, resilient networks and modernize IT operations. I'm pursuing an M.S. in Cybersecurity at Georgia Tech (GPA 3.67, in progress). My passion is network security—especially zero-trust architectures and practical network design that balances security, performance, and operability.

Location
San Francisco Bay Area
Current Focus
Cybersecurity Response & Engineering
Graduate Program
Georgia Tech — M.S. Cybersecurity (in progress)

Resumes

Certifications

  • CompTIA A+ — CompTIA
  • CompTIA Network+ — CompTIA
  • CompTIA Security+ — CompTIA

Achievements

  • Led business email compromise response — contained affected users and devices, investigated mailbox activity, and hardened accounts; rewrote the incident response procedure to clarify escalation, evidence handling, and client communications.
  • Improved endpoint threat detection — led ongoing Elastic Defend deployment and tuning efforts at PG&E, investigating endpoint alerts and refining detections to reduce false positives.
  • Strengthened Microsoft 365 identity security — implemented MFA and Conditional Access across client tenants, applied baseline Group Policy hardening, and used Microsoft Purview Audit for investigations.
  • Secured client networks — deployed VLAN segmentation, firewall policies, VPNs, and IDS/IPS to improve isolation and reduce lateral movement risk, including in healthcare environments.
  • Advanced HIPAA and SOC 2 compliance efforts — performed gap assessments, mapped safeguards, authored security and recovery policies, and collected audit evidence for healthcare and biotech clients.
  • Implemented immutable backups — configured Synology WORM storage and retention policies, tested recovery procedures, and documented and trained staff for deployment across multiple sites.
  • Built a zero-trust homelab — combined Tailscale access controls with SSO-backed authentication to grant least-privilege access to services based on identity and context.
  • Cut the stale ticket backlog by 90% — led a 7-person service desk, built performance dashboards and alerts, and reworked prioritization to accelerate urgent and security ticket response.