Nikhil Gajjar

About Nikhil Gajjar

Network Engineer with 10+ years of experience in the industry, which includes expertise in the areas of Routing, Switching and Firewall.• Implemented application-based policies using Palo Alto’s APP-ID, allowing fine-grained control over application usage and enabling tailored security measures.• Configured and managed Cisco Firepower 2100, 4100 appliances, providing scalable and high-performance security solutions for large enterprise networks.• Worked on Fortinet Firewall Features Logging, reporting and traffic analysis tools, and ability to identify and mitigate network security threats and anomalies.• Implemented and maintained Cisco Nexus 9k, 7k, 5k, 3k series switches, providing unified fabric and high density 10 Gigabit Ethernet (GBE) connectivity.• Deployed Cisco ACI across multiple data center environments and integrated security solutions in firewalls, IPS and endpoint within the ACI fabric to enforce security policies.• Experienced in optimizing network connectivity by leveraging SD WAN(Viptela) technologies.• Worked on Infoblox IPAM capabilities for centralized management of IP address, Subnetting, and IP address tracking.• Worked on implementing Security Incident and Event Management System (SIEM) using HP ArcSight and Splunk.

Experience

1. Network Security Engineer

   Cetera Financial Group

   Sep 2022 — Present · San Diego, CA, US

   Configured Virtual LANs (VLANs) to logically segregate network segments and control communication between them.• Worked on Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC) to centralize the management and monitoring of multiple Cisco Firepower devices, streamlining policy management and reporting.• Supported team on configuring and fine-tuned firewall policies and security profiles in Cisco Firepower appliances to enforce granular access controls and threat prevention.• Conducted regular security audits and vulnerability assessments using Cisco Firepower appliances to identify and remediate security risks.• Involved in establishing private and dedicated network connections on AWS using VPC peering and Direct Connect.• Worked on implementing URL filtering on the Palo Alto Firewall and controlling access to restricted sites.• Experienced in Firewall Migrations from Legacy to Palo Alto firewalls using migration tool from PAN.• Utilized Extra hop\'s packet capture and analysis capabilities to investigate security events, identify anomalies, and mitigate risks• Developed automation scripts and AWS tagging rules to enforce tagging policies and ensure resources are correctly labelled upon provisioning.• Worked on ACI programmability and automation using Restful APIs, Cisco ACI Toolkit, and scripting languages such as Python for infrastructure automation and orchestration.• performed software upgrades on ACI components to ensure we have the latest features and bug fixes• Utilized Catchpoint real user monitoring (RUM) agents to collect performance data from actual users\' devices and browsers.• Added new switches, configured interfaces, and ensured optimal connectivity and redundancy using ACI Fabric• Experienced in designing and architecting Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Spine and Leaf topologies for data center networks, ensuring scalability, redundancy and optimal performance.