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Hi, I am Igor

Igor Widlinski

Infrastructure, Devops, and CyberSecurity specialist

I am a passionate infrastructure, devops and cybersecurity specialist with 17 years of working experience. I create automated secure infrastructure as code, that is resilient, scalable, and reproducible.

Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
Certified Cloud Security Professional (CCSP)
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Professional
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Experiences

1
Wawanesa Insurance

June 2023 - Present

Canada

The Wawanesa Mutual Insurance Company, founded in 1896, is one of Canada’s largest mutual insurers, with over $4 billion in annual revenue and assets of 12 billion.

Senior Security Systems Administrator

June 2023 - Present

Responsibilities:
  • Deploying and maintaining servers in AWS with CloudFormation.
  • Developing strategies and plans to enforce security requirements and address identified risks.
  • Configuring security systems, analyzing security requirements, and recommending improvements.
  • Managing 5000+ endpoints using industry best anti-malware, DLP, and PAM services.
Sanctuary AI.

Jan 2023 - Jun 2023

Canada

Sanctuary AI is on a mission to create and deploy millions of industrial-grade humanoid robots to help address growing labor challenges.

Cloud System Administrator

Jan 2023 - Jun 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Implementing CI/CD capabilities for infrastructure and applications.
  • Contributing to the architecting and implementation of cloud-native and cloud migration solutions.
  • Writing infrastructure automation scripts and templates and integrating them with DevOps tools.
  • Infrastructure as Code using AWS CDK.
2
3
Zymeworks Inc.

March 2013 - January 2023

Canada

Developing novel medicines for patients with difficult-to-treat cancers and other serious diseases.

Senior Systems Administrator

March 2013 - January 2023

Responsibilities:
  • Migrated on premise datacenter to AWS.
  • Managed cloud ( AWS / Azure ) infrastructure.
  • Salt / Puppet / Terraform configuration management.
  • Created Gitlab CI/CD pipelines.
  • Zabbix monitoring and created Grafana dashboards.
  • Single Sign on using Azure AD / SAML / ADFS and various MFA solutions.
  • Created auto-scalable High Performance Computational Cluster (GridEngine) in AWS.
  • Worked with various storage technologies including NFS / AWS Lustre / Netapp.
  • Managed Meraki / Palo Alto / Juniper networking.
Incomm Canada Prepaid Ltd.

October 2011 - March 2013

Canada

Incomm is the industry leading marketer, distributor and technology innovator of stored-value gift and prepaid products.

ILinux Systems Administrator

October 2011 - March 2013

Responsibilities:
  • Created OS hardening scripts for PCI (Payments Card Industry) certification.
  • Server configuration, installation & maintenance (RHEL 5,6 and Solaris Patches and Firmware Updates).
  • Troubleshooting outages and coordinating resolutions with external entities.
  • Created OS update strategy for company’s older software/hardware.
4
5
Eigen Development Ltd.

July 2008 - October 2011

Canada

Successful transaction processing company dedicated to the task of managing payments for merchants.

Linux Systems / Network Administrator

July 2008 - October 2011

Responsibilities:
  • Server configuration, installation, & maintenance (Ubuntu).
  • Implementation/maintenance of VoIP server (Asterisk PBX) & all VoIP phones
  • Designed, supervised and implemented major power and environmental upgrade to the server room
  • Implementation of disaster recovery plan & daily back ups
  • Collaborate with developers for debugging and systems related issues
  • Performed network and application security testing as part of Payment Card Industry (PCI) certification.

Featured Posts

Recent Posts

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SAP-C02

Last Friday I passed SAP-C02 the AWS Solution Architect - Professional exam. This is my second AWS certificate having passed the AWS Solution Architect - Associate couple of months earlier. SAP-C02 took me about 2 months to study for and I used the following resources to study: Cantrill’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Professional course. This course was almost 70 hours long, and it took me about 1 montht to go through. It is a good course, but gosh is it long… I feel like it would be much better to complete 3 courses that are ~20 hours long instead of doing single Cantrill’s class. Stephene Maarek’s AWS Certified Solutions Architect Professional 2025 course. I ended up doing this course twice, with the second time being 3 days before the exam ( this involved 5+ hours per day cram sessions). Highly recommend My own AWS Organization created just for learning and practice. This org is made out of 3 accounts, with SSO set up ( using Azure). Tutorial’s Dojo Tests. These test are not perfect, and sometimes frustrating ( due to gramma, and the way they are written). For ~$15 USD the value is unbeatable. My test scores were as follows: Review mode Set 1: 73% Review mode Set 2: 76% Review mode Set 3: 76% Stephane Maarek’s Udemy SAP-C02 Practice Tests. My scores were: Practice mode Test 1: 72% Practice mode Test 2: 52% ( not sure what happened here, but I was sick and feverish when I did this one) Neal Davis’ Udemy SAP-C02 Practice Tests. My scores were: Test #1: 74% Test #2: 71% Test #3: 82% Overall the test took me 2 hours and 40 minutes to write, and overall was tough, but I felt confident I passed it when it was all done.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 | 2 minutes Read
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Oh My Zsh

Today I learned about Oh My ZSH. I’ve got it installed and running on my laptop. The reason to get it is because Oh My Zsh will not make you a 10x developer…but you may feel like one. Which hit the spot. Oh My Zsh makes Zsh sleek and I ended up changing my default SHELL to ZSH, but I do not plan to switch exclusively to ZSH as BASH is still the SHELL to be used on servers, and everywhere else.

Tuesday, March 25, 2025 | 1 minute Read
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First Billing Alarms

Enabling IAM access to Billing According to this post giving IAM access to Billing Console can only be done through console. So lets enable it.

Saturday, February 1, 2025 | 1 minute Read