(ISC)² CISSP

Vishu Adapa

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Cyber Resilience  ·  Hybrid Cloud  ·  AWS  ·  Azure  ·  GCP  ·  Enterprise AI

📍 Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

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20+ Years of Enterprise IT

Twenty-some years in enterprise IT taught me one thing above everything else. Tech problems are rarely about tech. They're about risk, money, and people, and if you don't solve for all three, you haven't really solved anything.

I've held just about every seat at the table. I started in support, taking the calls when things broke at 2 AM. Then I ran the infrastructure myself: storage, SAN fabrics, large VMware environments, backup at multi-petabyte scale. From there I moved into professional services at Dell EMC implementing what others had sold, then into architecture and presales designing it. The scale grew with the career, from a couple of petabytes to hundreds of petabytes spanning data centers and cloud. I won't propose anything I wouldn't be willing to implement, operate, or get paged for at 2 AM myself.

The last decade has been deep in cyber resilience and hybrid cloud: recovery vault design, DR strategy, and data protection across AWS, Azure, and GCP for customers in Energy, Financial Services, Healthcare, Insurance, Aerospace Manufacturing, and Retail. I earned my CISSP in there, because you can't honestly talk about recovery if you don't understand the attack. Lately I'm equally interested in enterprise AI: agents, automation, real workflows.

0 Years Experience
CISSP Certified
0 Cloud Platforms
0 Languages
☁️

Hybrid Cloud

Design and implementation of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS solutions across AWS, Azure, and GCP hyperscalers.

🔒

Cyber Resiliency

Cyber Recovery vault design with CyberSense-powered AI threat detection and ransomware recovery.

🤖

Enterprise AI

Building agents, automation, and real workflows. Bringing enterprise AI from concept into production.

🌟

Presales Engineering

Product briefings, live demos, POCs, and solution proposals that accelerate enterprise sales cycles.

Core Competencies

☁️ Cloud Platforms

Expert
AWS Azure GCP
Proficient
IaaSPaaSSaaS

🛡 Data Protection

Expert
Cohesity Networker Avamar Data Domain PPDM Cyber Recovery CyberSense
Proficient
RubrikVeeamCommvaultNetBackup

💾 Storage Arrays

Expert
PowerMax PowerStore PowerScale Unity XtremIO SRDF TimeFinder RecoverPoint VPLEX
Proficient
NetApp

🖥️ Compute & Virtualization

Expert
VMware vSphere Hyper-V Cisco UCS HP ProLiant Dell PowerEdge
Proficient
KubernetesOpenShift

📈 Scripting & DevOps

Expert
Python PowerShell
Proficient
TerraformAnsibleGitHubGitLab

🌎 Networking & Security

Expert
Cisco MDS Brocade FC Data Encryption LAN / WAN
Proficient
VPNFirewallIDS/IPSADDNS

📊 Databases

Proficient
MSSQLOracleSAP HANA

💬 Languages

Native / Fluent
English Telugu
Fluent
HindiTamil

Work Experience

Senior Systems Engineer

Cohesity
Nov 2025 – Present Current

📍 Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

  • Serve as the technical advisor on sales cycles for Strategic accounts across the DFW metro, working with an AI-powered data security and management platform
  • Design cyber resilience, data governance, and ransomware recovery architectures for enterprise customers in regulated industries
  • Built an automated environment health check framework covering security hardening, capacity planning, and performance. What used to take days of manual review now runs as a repeatable, data-driven engagement the whole team uses
  • Contribute enablement content and competitive playbooks that help the wider team move faster

Advisory Systems Engineer

Dell Technologies
Feb 2022 – Oct 2025 3 yrs 9 mos

📍 Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

  • Supported strategic enterprise customers across Global Financial Services, Insurance, and Aerospace Manufacturing as their technical advisor on data protection and cyber resilience, including environments at hundreds of petabytes across multiple data centers and cloud
  • Ran solution briefings, demos, and POCs centered on cyber resilience, designing PowerProtect Cyber Recovery vault architectures that keep business-critical services running through ransomware and outage
  • Led large-scale cyber recovery design for a global Fortune 5 retailer, architecting a hub-and-spoke vaulting model protecting regional distribution sites back to a central secure vault
  • Guided enterprises through data protection strategy during cloud migration, balancing security, recoverability, and cost

Implementation Practice Lead

Cohesity
Nov 2021 – Feb 2022 4 mos
  • Led installation of Cohesity clusters on branded hardware with Data Protection Policies for VMware, Hyper-V, MSSQL, and Oracle workloads
  • Configured Cloud Archive and deployed Cloud Edition instances as replication targets for in-cloud data protection

Advisory Systems Engineer

Dell Technologies
May 2017 – Nov 2021 4 yrs 7 mos

📍 Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex

  • Moved from delivery into presales, designing Dell EMC data protection architectures (Networker, Avamar, PPDM, Data Domain, Cyber Recovery) for Retail, Pharma, and Healthcare enterprises
  • Worked with the SAP HANA team at a global food and beverage manufacturer to find bottlenecks in their Azure VM infrastructure, then rearchitected disk layout and block size against Azure's published throughput limits. Backups ran over 75% faster with DDBoost writing to Data Domain in Azure
  • Led complex POCs involving multi-workload vaulting: cloud workloads, databases, mainframe, modern applications, and domain controllers in a single recovery architecture
  • Mentored engineers through complex deployments, multiplying team capacity; consistently beat objectives while serving as trusted advisor on evaluations spanning hundreds of petabytes

Sr. Solutions Architect

Dell Technologies
Apr 2013 – May 2017 4 yrs 2 mos

📍 Dallas-Fort Worth Area

  • Delivered enterprise data protection implementations as a professional services engineer (Networker, Avamar, Data Domain, RecoverPoint), turning reference designs into production systems that held up under real recovery conditions
  • Partnered with Oracle DBA teams at a global food and beverage manufacturer and a major energy utility to optimize backup interface routing, cutting restore times enough to drop RTO by 60% on business-critical databases
  • Led storage and backup migrations, integrations, and data center consolidations at scale across tens of petabytes spanning multiple data centers and cloud
  • Became the person teams called when a deployment got complicated, the bridge between what was sold and what actually had to run

Server, Storage & Backup Administrator

Alere Inc.
Jul 2009 – Apr 2013 3 yrs 10 mos

📍 Greater Atlanta Area

  • Owned the storage, backup, and virtualization backbone for a multi-site healthcare enterprise running more than 2 petabytes across multiple data centers. I was the person on call when recovery actually had to work
  • Led full modernization of the data protection environment, replacing a legacy NetBackup tape operation with Dell EMC Avamar and Networker backed by Data Domain. Backup windows shrank and restores became reliable across petabytes of clinical and operational data
  • Designed and managed SAN fabrics across Cisco MDS and Brocade switches, supporting large VMware vSphere environments and the multi-petabyte arrays behind them
  • Ran multiple storage migrations and data center consolidations at scale with minimal disruption to business-critical clinical and operational systems

Earlier Career (2004–2009)

Hallmark Global Technologies Server, Storage & Backup Administrator 2008–2009 · Upper Saddle River, NJ
Dell EMC Sr. TSE — ISG Storage 2007–2008 · Bengaluru, India
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Senior Systems Engineer 2005–2007 · Bengaluru, India
IBM CSC Analyst 2004–2005

What Colleagues & Clients Say

Vishu's expertise in cyber recovery vault design was instrumental in helping our organization achieve aggressive RTO objectives. His ability to align technical architecture with business requirements is exceptional — a true trusted advisor.

SR
Sr. Director of IT Infrastructure Fortune 500 Energy Company

As a presales engineer, Vishu stands out for translating complex data protection concepts into clear business value. His CISSP background and hands-on Cohesity experience gave our security team tremendous confidence throughout the evaluation.

MK
VP of Infrastructure & Security Regional Financial Services Firm

Vishu's multi-cloud DR knowledge is unmatched. He helped us design a hybrid backup strategy across AWS and Azure that has held up through real incidents. His 20+ years of experience shows in every recommendation.

JP
Cloud Architect Large Healthcare Provider

Certifications

Volunteering & Service

🏠

HOA Board of Directors

Governance, budgeting, and community building for a new owner-occupied development in McKinney, TX.

🚨

CERT Volunteer

Community Emergency Response Team. Trained to support neighbors and first responders during emergencies and disaster response.

⚖️

CASA Advocate

Court Appointed Special Advocate, advocating for the best interests of children in the court system.

🔌

Citizens Police Academy

McKinney, TX. Completed the city's program to build firsthand understanding of local public safety and community policing.

Thoughts & Perspectives

Cyber Resilience

Zero Trust Meets Data Protection: Building a Modern Cyber Recovery Vault

How Zero Trust principles integrate with air-gapped vault architectures to create truly resilient cyber recovery environments for enterprise organizations.

Disaster Recovery

RTO vs RPO: Designing DR Strategies That Actually Hold Up Under Pressure

A practical guide to setting realistic recovery time and point objectives — and the architectural decisions that make or break them when disaster strikes.

Ransomware Defense

Why Ransomware Recovery Requires More Than Just Backups

Traditional backup strategies are no longer sufficient. How AI-powered threat detection and immutable vault architectures change the calculus for modern enterprises.

Let’s Connect

Open to discussing data security challenges, cyber resiliency strategies, and enterprise cloud solutions.