My passion for IT and my scientific background have given me the troubleshooting and technical skills I need and while my employment has greatly built on this, it has further given me the ability to develop the management view of IT. This combination allows me to zoom into deep technical levels while also maintaining a high-level view of how IT should be steered to align with current and future business requirements. This turns IT from simply a cost-centre to a strategic business asset.
I currently lead a small team to provide rapid response to user and desktop support while also maintaining and continuously improving the core IT servers and services that enable the business to do more and get more out of its IT investment.
Business for IT
In my current employment I am the IT Manager, responsible for anything that comes with a plug or a battery. I am also the bridge between management and the IT team. I have experience of understanding and translating business requirements for IT such as capacity, scalability, service agreements and budgets into decisions for upgrades, new servers and hardware and software purchases to give the solution desired.
IT for Business
I have performed many upgrades, migrations and implementations of new services that has greatly increased the capacity, performance, scalability and reliability of the IT systems I maintain. Each one was performed with the needs of the business in mind:
- Have a more reliable internet service for staff and remote users: set up an enterprise firewall array with network load balancing to ensure there’s still a connection even if any node and any internet line went down, there would still be full service. Implement a range of secure remote access options for maximum compatibility.
- Make email mission critical and resilient: upgrade to Exchange Server 2007 with a clustered mailbox and three external mailservers meaning users have no storage quotas and not a single email sent to us would bounce.
- Ensure the protection of company information: a new disk-to-disk-to-tape backup system with a backup every 15 minutes on Exchange and Source Code control servers, providing continuous protection for the most critical systems. Also protecting over 10 TB of company data in file stores 4 times a day, every day. Taking advantage of snapshots for immediate restore and recovery.
- Give users a productive desktop experience: migration of the company to Windows Vista and then Windows 7 with the latest Office and developement software stack. Also developed deployment services to reduce the end-to-end re-imaging process from over two hours to less than 20 minutes.
- Give our clients a better hosting environment: migration of legacy virtual machines to Hyper-V R2 virtualisation systems for client hosting and internal testing machines allows more virtual machines, better resource usage and more scalability of the virtual infrastructure.
- Reduce our expensive legacy systems: a continuous evaluation and upgrade process to ensure expensive and time-consuming legacy systems to not become entrenched in the infrastructure. Also includes safely decommissioning and replacing old hardware while keeping IT services running.
- Be more agile and responsive: thorough documentation of the network and IT assets and improvements across the board allow the IT group to become more active in dealing with new incidents instead of being overwhelmed by support issues. This also means we have the resources for upgrades and new provisioning services that are advantageous to the business.
From my unique role in the company I have the ability to translate business requirements into IT solutions that also provide room for growth in the future by provisioning the capacity required today.