SANS Technology Institute: SANS Technology Institute Leadership Essay

Leadership Laboratory

Leadership Lab: STI Degree Candidates' Leadership Essays

SANS Technology Institute's mission is to develop the leaders of the future for the information security industry. One of our admission requirements is that an applicant complete an essay describing leadership qualities they have demonstrated in the past.

SANS Technology Institute Leadership Essay

December 26th, 2006
By John Hally

Dear SANS Institute Admissions Faculty and Staff:

I feel that I possess the necessary leadership qualities required for admission to the Masters of Science in Information Security Engineering. I feel true leadership is demonstrated in many ways. The definition of leadership found on Wikipedia.org contains a whole host of leadership qualities and characteristics that can be used to identify leadership potential. The suggested list of leadership qualities from Wikipedia.org contains many characteristics, all of which are important, but I believe the following are essential:

Technical skill at task at hand
Guiding others through modeling (providing a role model)
Initiative and entrepreneurial drive
Dedication
Sense of purpose
Optimism

I will attempt to convey these qualities I've shown in the past with regard to a particular event that happened recently at my place of employment. In the spring of 2006 the North East was hit with a very large amount of rain that culminated with a deluge that was dubbed "The Mothers Day Storm". At my current place of employment two of the three buildings that make up the campus were located along a large river, which continued rising from the beginning of the last large amount of rainfall on Sunday, until the rain finally subsided late Monday night. During this time the river rose to critical levels and in places over-ran the embankments. One of our three buildings eventually succumbed to the river, being completely flooded out and had to have street power cut and evacuated. The second building was perilously close to the same fate but carried a much larger price; it housed our main datacenter that runs applications that are used on a 24x7x365 basis.

As I arrived early on Monday morning I received a call to meet the General Manager in the building that housed the main datacenter. Essentially we were meeting to discuss ramifications of the impending flood and unfortunately most of upper management was having difficulty getting to work because of road closings. The decision was made to prepare for the worst and move as much equipment as possible from the main datacenter to a secondary datacenter that we had in the works to be populated over the next few months. Fortunately we had most of the infrastructure in place but network resource capacity was a very large issue. The limited staff and I met quickly and devised a plan to get the datacenter as ready as possible.

I took on the responsibility of getting port capacity into the network gear and the host cabinets wired as quickly as possible while the systems administrators started to move key systems. Because we were evacuating the buildings I was able to scavenge switch port gear from end user switches and use them for port density for our online services. We recently had hired another network engineer who jumped right in with my wiring the cabinets as the others worked on getting host capacity in place. Once we had network and host capacity we then had to configure the services and load-balancing devices to make use of the new systems. The newest engineer had limited experience with our topology and configurations. He and I met quickly to go over the necessary configurations to get in place which we divided up amongst ourselves. He took the lead in adding host capacity and switch port configuration while I focused on our load-balancers and how we were going to switch traffic between datacenters.

After performing most of the configuration of the load-balancers and getting a working subset of our applications functioning I was involved in high-level discussions on how to manipulate the traffic flow to the datacenters, and determine how and when the cutover would take place. We eventually decided to use DNS round-robin techniques to effectively load-balance traffic if and when the time came. We were lucky in that we never had to shut down the main datacenter, but we were essentially ready in one day to take limited traffic and full traffic at the end of three days. We accomplished what was planned to be a three month build-out in under a week, and I feel I had a very important role in it all.

I feel the above demonstrated a number of leadership qualities in a number of situations. I believe that I was able to demonstrate my technical skill sets by doing a lot of configuration under tremendous pressure. I was also able to show initiative and serve as a role model to the new network engineer by leading the network portion of the capacity build out and configuration. I feel I also showed dedication, sense of purpose, and optimism in the face of this potential disaster by believing that with the great makeup of staff we have we would be able to keep our online services working uninterrupted from the customers perspective but working the long hours and keeping an upbeat positive attitude.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

“SANS provides top instructors; that is what separates SANS from all other learning opportunities.”
Todd Greenlaw, Telus

The SANS Technology Institute

Leadership Laboratory

SANS Technology Institute Leadership Essay

December 26th, 2006
By John Hally

“SANS provides top instructors; that is what separates SANS from all other learning opportunities.” Todd Greenlaw, Telus

The SANS Technology Institute

Leadership Laboratory

SANS Technology Institute Leadership Essay

December 26th, 2006By John Hally

“SANS provides top instructors; that is what separates SANS from all other learning opportunities.”
Todd Greenlaw, Telus

December 26th, 2006
By John Hally