City of Dallas Boot Camp Training

AT&T Cybersecurity – City of Dallas Success Story

During my tenure at AT&T Cybersecurity, I was hand-selected to lead the Sales Engineering team for the Public Sector (SLED), supporting customers across roughly half the United States — including cities, municipalities, and educational institutions.

One of my favorite engagements during this time was with the City of Dallas, a partnership that held deep personal meaning for me. As a Dallas native, it was both an honor and a responsibility to help protect the city’s digital assets — the same infrastructure that serves millions of residents every day.

The Challenge

When I joined the project, the City of Dallas was in the middle of a paid, one-year proof of concept (POC) for our USM Anywhere platform. The goal was to monitor several key network segments and demonstrate the platform’s value.

Unfortunately, progress had stalled. The security team was struggling with slow response times, limited visibility, and uncertainty about how to extract actionable insights from the platform. The POC had become stagnant, and the customer’s confidence was fading.

Turning the POC Around

Once I began working with the City’s Security Operations Team and our internal deployment engineers, momentum shifted almost immediately.

I started receiving direct calls from the city’s security analysts, who were eager to understand what they were seeing within the platform and how to leverage it effectively. These collaborative sessions helped me identify a critical gap — the original POC lacked clear, measurable goals, which made success difficult to define or achieve.

To resolve this, I initiated a full POC redesign. Together, we clearly documented:

• The objectives for each monitored network segment

• The metrics of success for visibility, alert fidelity, and response workflow

• The expected business outcomes and risk reductions the city wanted to demonstrate

By reframing the POC around defined outcomes and empowering the analysts with guided context, we quickly achieved measurable results — restoring both confidence and momentum.

From Proof of Concept to Full Partnership

Within weeks, the City’s security leadership team was impressed by the turnaround. The improved visibility, engagement, and tailored roadmap allowed us to exceed POC expectations and successfully close the deal for a full USM Anywhere deployment.

At the conclusion of the sales process, the Security Director made a special request:
he asked if I could return to deliver a customized analyst training program for his team.

There was only one problem — the official training department’s schedule was two months out, and the existing curriculum didn’t align with the team’s immediate operational needs. Despite not being a certified trainer, I sought and received approval to develop a custom “Boot Camp” training focused on their environment, use cases, and workflows.

The Custom Boot Camp

Over the course of two weeks, I designed and delivered a hands-on training program covering:

• Threat detection and triage workflows within USM Anywhere

• Log correlation and alert analysis

• Incident response best practices tailored to public-sector networks

• Real-world use cases drawn from the City of Dallas’ actual data and topology

Training sessions were limited to four hours per day, accommodating operational schedules while maintaining engagement. The result was a fully functional and confident security team, operational within two weeks — compared to the two-month delay they would have faced waiting for formal training.

The Outcome

The City of Dallas became one of our strongest success stories in the region.
Through proactive engagement, technical clarity, and hands-on education, the city’s analysts transitioned from frustration to fluency. The project went from a struggling POC to a model deployment that demonstrated the power of partnership, adaptability, and customer-centric engineering.

Reflection

This experience reinforced a lesson I’ve carried throughout my career:

Great technology doesn’t create customer success — people do.

By listening first, clarifying goals, and tailoring solutions to real operational needs, I helped transform a struggling proof of concept into a sustainable cybersecurity program that protects one of the largest cities in Texas.