I’m Imran Saeed, an infrastructure engineer working in networks and security, based in Sugar Land, Texas. I’ve been in IT for more than 25 years, starting as a customer support engineer at Siemens in Pakistan in 1995 and working since then across Pakistan, Singapore, Malaysia and the United States.
I started this blog to give family and friends practical tips on phones, computers and gadgets, the questions they kept bringing to me anyway. It now has a narrower focus: one post a day, alternating between artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, written for IT professionals, technical managers and small-business owners who need to know what to do next.
What I work on
Most of my work is hybrid infrastructure: Windows Server, Active Directory and Entra ID, virtualization, backup and disaster recovery, and Fortinet networks with SD-WAN and site-to-site VPNs. In my last senior systems administrator role, for an architecture firm of about 240 people across three offices, I consolidated two racks of 14 servers down to a single host, moved 12 business-critical virtual machines to the cloud so a Gulf Coast hurricane or flood couldn’t take the firm offline, and replaced the network in all three offices with a centrally managed Fortinet stack.
Before moving to Texas I spent many years in Johor Bahru, Malaysia, running businesses of my own. I was technical director of an IT services company that delivered outsourced support and ERP projects (Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Odoo), a founding partner in an electrical and building-automation firm, and for over a decade directed product development and services for a company making security, surveillance, networking and VoIP systems. Building teams, training staff and owning the client relationship taught me as much as the engineering did.
I hold the ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC) certification and Fortinet NSE 1 to 3, and I’m working toward Fortinet NSE 4 and PMI’s CAPM. I speak English, Urdu and Punjabi, and enough Malay to get work done.
My company, BizTack Cyber, is where I offer this work as a service. You can also find me on LinkedIn.
If there’s a topic you’d like me to cover, or a question about something I’ve written, use the form at the bottom of this page. Helping others still helps me.
Photo copyright
Unless otherwise stated, all photos are Copyright “Imran Saeed”, licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA. You can redistribute and modify my photos, as long as it’s for non-commercial purposes.
Photos I don’t own the copyright to link to the author’s page (for example a Flickr account), and their alt text credits the photographer. If you don’t want your photographs on this website, contact me using the form below.
