Dennis Cary
IT operations, infrastructure and cybersecurity leader across global manufacturing, public safety and healthcare. USAF veteran. Builder of things in the lab.
Summary
I lead IT operations, infrastructure and cybersecurity for distributed, regulated organizations. Over 25+ years that has meant a 25-site global manufacturing footprint across three continents, a county government with law enforcement and E911 to keep online, and multi-site physician practices on Epic. I build IT functions from the ground up, bring outsourced work back in-house, and stay hands-on enough to rebuild the stack myself.
Outside of work I run a home lab that doubles as a proving ground: a private AI platform, a Proxmox cluster, offline knowledge archives and a stack of custom tools. The projects below are where I try things before I recommend them to anyone.
Selected achievements
- Led a 25-person global IT organization, including regional IT directors in Asia, across 25 manufacturing facilities and 1,500 employees in 20+ countries for 16 years, through the technology integration of five acquisitions.
- Reduced annual operating costs at two organizations by restructuring IT teams, insourcing outsourced services and ending consulting contracts that weren’t earning their keep.
- Built a county’s first integrated IT and operations department supporting law enforcement, Emergency Management and E911, and held 100% uptime on critical public-safety systems.
- Insourced a records digitization program covering 25+ years of history; designed SOX-compliant IT controls and a global disaster recovery and business continuity framework.
Career
ETSU Health
2025 – present · Director of Technology & Operations; Acting CIO and HIPAA Security Officer
- Run IT operations, infrastructure and enterprise applications across a 25-site organization, including Epic (Community Connect); lead an 8-person team (5 IT, 3 EMR) supporting about 800 users.
- Cut operating costs in the first year by auditing service agreements, winding down third-party consulting and moving that work to internal staff.
- Led a network security initiative and briefed C-level leadership on a firewall platform migration.
- Built a vendor security audit program, including a privacy review of marketing analytics and ad technology for regulated data.
- Leading governance and vendor data-protection planning for enterprise generative AI adoption.
- Set 3- and 5-year technology strategy, write enterprise IT policy and SOPs, and mentor staff toward a leadership succession pipeline.
Healthstar Physicians
2022 – 2025 · Director of Technology & Operations; Acting CIO and HIPAA Security Officer
- Directed IT strategy, infrastructure, network security, disaster recovery and business continuity across 24+ facilities in seven counties.
- Architected the modernization roadmap that moved aging legacy systems onto a more resilient hybrid cloud infrastructure.
- Restructured the IT organization around clear roles, goals and a mentoring-driven model.
- Insourced a records digitization project spanning 25+ years of history.
Sumner County Government
2017 – 2022 · Director of Operations & Technology
- Founded the county’s first integrated operations and technology department for government, law enforcement, Emergency Management and the E911 center.
- Built a 10-person IT team from scratch: policies, procedures, a new ticketing system and staff development.
- Restructured network infrastructure to cut daily outages, and held 100% uptime on critical public-safety systems.
- Served three months as Interim E911 Director, leading the county 911 center through a staffing gap.
- Managed the department budget and vendor partnerships, including Tyler Technologies and CentralSquare public-safety software.
Dynacast International
2001 – 2017 · Global Operations & IT Director
- Top global IT executive for a precision die-casting manufacturer: 25 people, with regional IT directors in China and Singapore reporting to me.
- Ran IT, infrastructure and operations for 25 plants across North America, Europe and Asia — 1,500 employees in 20+ countries.
- Led technology due diligence and integration for five acquisitions, bringing each plant onto the standard global infrastructure.
- Owned SOX IT general controls and the global disaster recovery and business continuity framework; kept Epicor ERP and plant-floor systems running.
United States Air Force
6 years · Structural Engineering & Construction Technology · Honorable discharge
- Technical training in hydraulic, electrical, electronic and pneumatic systems — the foundation for a career spent troubleshooting systems under pressure.
What I bring
- IT operations and service delivery
- Infrastructure and network architecture
- Cybersecurity and risk management
- Hybrid cloud and virtualization
- Business continuity and disaster recovery
- Compliance: SOX, HIPAA, regulated data
- IT strategy and governance
- Budget ownership and cost reduction
- M&A technology integration
- Multi-site and global operations
- Vendor and contract negotiation
- Team building and succession planning
Technical environment
VMware ESXi · Proxmox VE · Cisco, UniFi and multi-vendor firewalls · Microsoft 365 · Epicor ERP · Tyler Technologies · CentralSquare · Epic (Community Connect) · ServiceNow · Ubuntu and Linux Mint · Veeam, Rubrik and Datto backup · Arctic Wolf MDR · Wazuh SIEM
In the lab right now
- Running
AI Stack
A private AI platform on hardware in the lab: local models, retrieval over my own notes, agents and research workflows, all behind one gateway.
- Running
Homelab
The infrastructure under everything else: virtualization, storage, network, backups, monitoring and offline fallbacks.
- Building
Obsidian Toolkit
Custom Obsidian plugins that turn one encrypted vault into a journal, dashboard, lab notebook and mail archive.
- Building
Field Sensor
A drop-in, headless sensor that shows what’s really on a network: unknown devices, rogue Wi-Fi, and anything probing back.
- Building
MailHub
A self-hosted hub that pulls every personal inbox home, sorts and scans it, and lets a local model do the triage.
Contact
Email denniscary@outlook.com or find me on LinkedIn.