AIS Network Announces Six New Team Members

Summary: AIS Network, a leading, SWaM-certified provider of advanced information security and other IT managed services to Virginia government agencies, has appointed six new team members to support the delivery of IT services in Virginia.

Richmond, Va. — January 30, 2019 —  AIS Network, a leading, SWaM-certified provider of advanced information security and other IT managed services to Virginia government agencies, has appointed six new team members.

“As we begin work on a new contract to provide services to the Commonwealth of Virginia, we are delighted to welcome aboard a dynamic group of professionals who collectively bring to bear more than 130 years’ worth of experience and leadership,” said AISN CEO Jay Atkinson.

Atkinson said that most of the new team will support authentication services for more than 65,000+ Commonwealth of Virginia users. AISN’s new Virginia-based team members include:

James Grifasi, Senior Systems Administrator
Grifasi has more than 23 years’ combined experience in Windows NT/Active Directory and Novell Netware administration. While working at Northrop Grumman to support the Commonwealth of Virginia, his role was as a Windows server engineer, onboarding physical, virtual, and rapid infrastructure deployment-based Windows 2008 and 2012 servers and Linux RHEL 6 and 7 servers.

Neera Jain, Active Directory Services Technical and Team Lead
Jain has extensive background in domain name services, security and risk management and has been the Active Directory Services Technical and Team Lead since 2006. She holds multiple certifications, including AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Certified Information Systems Security Professional, Certificate of Cloud Security Knowledge and Associate Business Continuity Professional. Neera is a 22-year veteran of Northrop Grumman, where, prior to becoming the AD team lead, she served as a systems engineer, and later, as a platform engineer. Earlier in her 30+ year IT career, she held positions at General Research Corporation, Unisys and Automated Sciences Group.

Anthony D’Amato, Systems Administrator III
D’Amato has a career developing, deploying and maintaining IT strategies and project implementations and has more than 12 years of experience leading cross functional teams. Before joining Northrop Grumman in 2017 as a directory services administrator serving the Commonwealth of Virginia, he was the digital operations manager at General Electric. Previously, he spent more than 15 years at Alstom Power managing global IT projects, first as senior system specialist and later as directory services manager.

Alfred Brown, Systems Administrator III
Brown has more than two decades of experience providing engineering and operational support. Through Northrop Grumman, he has been supporting the Commonwealth of Virginia over the last 15 years. He developed the Directory Services tower’s disaster recovery plan for 24-hour recovery of the Commonwealth’s Active Directory and Domain Naming Service. Prior to Northrop Grumman, Brown’s IT career included positions at the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond and Perot Systems Corporation.

Kelly Fields, Systems Administrator I
Fields is an enterprise messaging and mobility engineer with 15 years’ combined expertise in Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and AirWatch for large-scale, high-visibility technical environments. Through SLAIT Consulting, she supported a variety of Commonwealth of Virginia messaging services and helped Northrop Grumman maintain transparency of the commonwealth’s migrated e-mail system. Her team was recognized for success in migrating more than 85,000 end users to a third party. Prior to SLAIT, Fields worked for CompuCom after a decade with Northrop Grumman as an enterprise system and mobility engineer supporting the Commonwealth’s messaging environment. Previous IT roles have included work with VITA as well as the Virginia Department of Transportation.

David Snell, Systems Administrator I
Throughout his more than 18 years in the IT industry, Snell has earned multiple security clearances as well as awards, including Northrop Grumman’s 2017 Leadership Award, 2017 Excellence in Morale Award and 2016 “Bravo Bronze” award for going above and beyond in leadership. Over the last decade with Northrop Grumman, Snell has been providing account administration and help desk support for Commonwealth of Virginia customers and network monitoring for the Department of Family Protective Services.

AISN announced in November that it would team with Unisys on a Virginia Information Technologies Agency contract to provide server, storage and data center services over six years.

In addition, AISN holds multiple commonwealth convenience contracts for Virginia government. They are the CAI Virginia IT Contingent Labor Contract Statement of Work (SOW) – Application Development, Information Security and Infrastructure Services; VA-120416-AISN Hosting Services; and VA-120413-BPI Web Applications Maintenance and Operations. Executive branch agencies, counties, cities, towns, schools and all other public entities throughout the commonwealth can use AISN to build, host, operate and maintain their mission-critical applications, websites, portals, databases and more.

About AIS Network
AIS Network is a Virginia SWaM-certified leader in advanced information security, award-winning application development and cloud solutions with a wide footprint in Virginia state and local government. Solving complex IT challenges and managing digital risk to help clients thrive in an unpredictable world has been our core business for more than 26 years. As the trusted and reliable partner of the Commonwealth of Virginia since 2012, we drive exceptional value through our deep knowledge of state agency data protection, compliance, governance and internal auditing procedures and controls. Our unmatched customer experience is rooted in decades of expertise engaging with Forbes- and Fortune-ranked global corporations, government agencies and other large enterprise clients to deliver these solutions in addition to multi-cloud managed services for the world’s leading platforms, data visualization and analytics, high security hosting and consultative reviews. Visit www.aisn.net.