Jim Counts
Cloud/DevOps Architect
Escondido, California, United States
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Jim Counts is a Cloud and DevOps architect specializing in unblocking and accelerating enterprises, large and small, as they move from traditional to cloud-native architectures. With over twenty years of experience, Jim found his niche early on building dependable automated systems and now focuses on making infrastructure management repeatable, reliable, and sustainable. Jim holds a BA in Economics from Humboldt State University in Northern California. Later he returned home to the opposite end of California to earn an MS in Computer Science from CSU San Marcos.
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The Azure Trifecta: 10 Must-Do Checks to Secure, Harden, and Optimize Your Subscriptions
Managing Azure at scale is no small feat. Between sprawling resources, complex IAM configurations, and ever-growing costs, it’s easy for critical issues to slip through the cracks. In this fast-paced, practical session, we’ll walk through 10 high-impact checks every organization should make across their Azure subscriptions.
Whether you’re responsible for cloud governance, cost management, or just want to sleep better at night, you’ll learn how to lock down security, improve operational resilience, and eliminate waste—without slowing down your teams. Real-world examples, actionable tips, and no fluff. You’ll leave with a checklist worth sharing.
Production-Ready Azure: 10 Checks for Security, Reliability, and Cost Efficiency
Before you ship an Azure solution to production, do you know if it’s truly ready? In this session, Jim Counts shares ten essential checks across security, reliability, and cost efficiency that separate mature cloud environments from the ones that break—or overspend—under real-world pressure.
You’ll learn how to validate identity and network protections, confirm that your workloads are resilient and observable, and spot the silent cost leaks that erode your cloud budget. Each check is drawn from real-world architecture reviews and delivery experience—designed to help teams build confidently and operate efficiently.
PANEL: Building a Security-First Culture: Driving Behavior Change Across the Enterprise
Cyber incidents rarely happen because of missing tools — they happen because of missing behaviors. This panel explores how organizations can overcome the biggest obstacles to security culture: employee fatigue, resistance to change, and the gap between policy and practice. Leaders will share how they’ve shifted mindsets, engaged executives and frontline teams, and built lasting habits that turn security from a roadblock into a business enabler.
Please join Dan Beckett, Ike Ellis, Chris Haddad, and Jim Counts for this insightful panel that draws on their rich and diverse experiences.
Lock It Down: 10 Azure DevOps Security Settings You Need to Change Right Now
Azure DevOps is powerful—but with great power comes a surprising number of default settings that quietly leave your pipelines, code, and credentials exposed. In this session, Solliance Distinguished Engineer Jim Counts walks through ten security misconfigurations that every organization should fix today to prevent avoidable incidents and compliance gaps.
You’ll see how these risks appear in real-world environments—and exactly how to close them using built-in features like permission scoping, template enforcement, and auditing. The session blends practical configuration guidance with lessons learned from enterprise case studies, giving you a clear, actionable roadmap to harden Azure DevOps without slowing down your teams.
Delivering Secure Enterprise Azure Solutions - in a day
This workshop will explore how to deliver secure enterprise solutions to Azure while sharing real world experiences that cover topologies from simpler architectures, to more complex architectures involving hybrid cloud and on premise solutions. Drawing from diverse experiences helping customers deliver and operate Azure production solutions, Michele and Jim will take you through a journey through a series of Azure solution architecture blueprints and best practices including how to select the appropriate Azure resources for compute and hosting, API delivery, networking and routing, data storage and messaging - while also covering how to best secure those resources, and ensure they are designed for high availability and disaster recovery. The goal of the workshop is to help you understand the best use of Azure resources, how to secure them appropriately, and understand the challenges that enterprises may face while planning for Azure delivery.
HA/DR for Developers
Are you worried that a transition to DevOps will upset your work/life balance? Have you ever had to redesign a cloud solution after finding it hasn't met requirements for availability and recoverability? As organizations adopt DevOps practices, developers must understand High Availability and Disaster Recovery terms and concepts to ensure they've incorporated these qualities into their solution architectures. How can you architect a system so it "never" goes down? While 100% reliability may not always be possible, you can ensure disasters are rare and short-lived. Get back your work/life balance and sleep easy without worrying about whether your production system is running.
From Launch Pad to Landing Zone: DevOps Governance with Terraform
DevOps project sprawl is real! Large organizations with many teams need to support a variety of configurations from infrastructure governance to domain-specific app deployments, all while enforcing good security practices like least privilege for each team. Maintaining these controls by hand leads to complexity, stagnation, and insecure shortcuts. In this session, you'll learn how Terraform can automate this configuration--using Terraform--and make doing the right thing easy!
Microsoft Azure + AI Conference Fall 2021 Sessionize Event
Automation + DevOps Summit Sessionize Event
KCDC 2021 Sessionize Event
Jim Counts
Cloud/DevOps Architect
Escondido, California, United States
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