Kerry Cordero | Network Architect & IT Engineering Leader
I’m Kerry Cordero, a network architect and Lead IT Network Engineer with more than 25 years of experience designing, building, modernizing, and securing enterprise infrastructure.
My experience spans large enterprise organizations, including companies with more than 10,000 employees and geographically distributed operations. Across these environments, I’ve designed and modernized networks supporting business-critical services in insurance, healthcare, financial services, hospitality, government, and utilities.
My background includes Fortune 100 experience at Progressive Insurance, enterprise architecture at Shriners Hospitals for Children, and global network infrastructure leadership at Sandals Resorts International.
I’ve worked in environments where infrastructure supports patient care, financial systems, international business operations, and essential public services. Those experiences shaped how I approach architecture: understand the business, define ownership, keep the design understandable, and make sure the people supporting it can operate it.
1. My background
I built my career through engineering, consulting, architecture, and management roles. I’ve been responsible for hands-on implementation and troubleshooting, technical standards, infrastructure planning, team guidance, and coordinating work across departments.
- Progressive Insurance, Lead IT Network Engineer: architecture, modernization, and implementation across enterprise networks, including WAN, data centers, cloud connectivity, internet edge, routing, and network security.
- Shriners Hospitals for Children, Sr. Enterprise Network Architect: network modernization across hospitals, offices, and data centers, including standardized architectures, resilient routing, and complex infrastructure migrations.
- Sandals Resorts International, IT Global Network Infrastructure Manager: global network, WAN, and data center infrastructure supporting geographically distributed resort and corporate operations.
My background also includes roles with Raymond James Financial, Broward County, Brand Institute, Kintetsu World Express, BE Aerospace, and FPL, along with running an independent IT infrastructure consulting practice.
2. The work behind the experience
My project experience includes building new environments and transforming existing ones while keeping business services available. Major areas of work include:
- Data center builds and migrations: new network infrastructure, expansions, consolidations, and the migration of applications, servers, and services from legacy environments.
- Enterprise network modernization: redesigning routing, addressing, segmentation, and connectivity around consistent standards and operational requirements.
- WAN resiliency and routing: BGP architectures, redundant paths, failover behavior, and validation of how a design responds when components fail.
- Cloud connectivity: multi-cloud networking work across AWS, Azure, and GCP, including AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, Equinix connectivity, and BGP routing.
- Security and operations: network security, monitoring, automation, documentation, and operational handoff in environments supporting PCI, HIPAA, and SOX requirements.
My technical background spans Cisco enterprise routing and switching, Palo Alto Networks, F5 BIG-IP, Cisco ISE, and tools such as Splunk, Ansible, Python, Bash, and PowerShell. The platform matters, but the decisions around it determine whether the environment remains supportable.
3. How I approach architecture
A design has to account for failure, maintenance, growth, security, and the team that will support it after implementation. I want to know which path traffic takes, what happens when that path fails, how we prove recovery works, and who owns the next step when something breaks.
I also believe good infrastructure depends on how IT is organized. Unclear ownership, disconnected teams, incomplete requirements, and weak operational handoffs can undermine a technically sound design. Architecture needs to connect people, processes, technology, and operations.
4. Why I created 3o5.io
I’m from Miami, and the name 3o5.io is a nod to the 305. I created this site to turn decades of practical experience into a structured resource for engineers, technical leads, architects, and IT leaders.
The site follows the development of a fictional enterprise, RiZa Consulting Group. We begin with organizational structure, leadership, service ownership, and governance, then build toward infrastructure, routing, data centers, cloud connectivity, security, resiliency, monitoring, and automation.
Along the way, I share design decisions, architectural tradeoffs, practical examples, and reusable templates. My goal is to help readers understand why a design works, where it can fail, and what it takes to support it in an enterprise.
The scenarios are fictional and informed by professional experience. They do not reproduce any employer’s internal architecture or confidential information.
5. Education and professional development
I hold a Master of Science in Management from the University of Florida’s Warrington College of Business and a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology, Cybersecurity and Information Assurance, from Western Governors University.
My professional development also includes Cisco specialist certifications in enterprise infrastructure, network security, and identity management.
The views expressed on 3o5.io are my own. Employer names identify professional experience and do not imply endorsement of this site.