Head of IT Systems
Naufar
Total years of experience :19 years, 11 Months
Managed large IT infrastructure to service Naufar’s complex business model comprising of addiction and rehabilitation clinical operations, premium hospitality and research centre.
IT Operations
Monitoring and tuning systems to provide optimum and secure services, meeting best industry standards and regulatory requirements.
Ensuring smooth day-to-day operations, addressing business priorities and resolving incidents and problems in a timely manner.
IT Infrastructure Management
Manage the design, deployment and roll-out to operations of a complex state of the art IT infrastructure, comprising of more than 300 network devices and 400 servers.
In line with regulatory and security requirements, managed the successful deployment of systems like VDI, application virtualization, MFA based remote access and privileged access management solutions.
Contract & Service management
Developed service performance reporting for the managed operations.
Developed a weighted service level agreement based on Naufar’s business priorities to manage the performance and delivery of outsource services provided by third party operator.
Recruited and lead a high-performance team of senior system administrators and DBA's with fulltime and contract
resources that delivered highly reliable, cost-effective network, data center, IT security and application services
to the company offices.
•Develop Innovative and forward looking strategic technology roadmap(s) to support current and anticipated operational and business needs.
•Helmed IT infrastructure strategy and operations improvements, built infrastructure utilizing converged infrastructure, led private cloud initiative, and VDI implementation.
•Participate in IT strategy planning.
•Perform an ongoing assessment on TPA IT architectural design and technology capabilities, ensuring and implementing best industry practices to introduce enhancements in IT operations, and SLA’s.
•Renegotiated services contract to expand the service offering and lower cost by $1 million over 3 years. Continually cut IT spend from agreements negotiations, utilization of outsourcing contracts, and end-to-end virtualization in datacenters and desktop environments.
•Issued RFP’s and replaced incumbent corporate data and voice network services, server infrastructure and storage provider resulting in significant service improvement and significantly lower annual cost.
•Championed and drove the use of server virtualization (CISCO UCS Infrastructure & VMware vSOM), implemented a tiered storage architecture aligned to business requirements and developed Backup and DR strategy to decrease RTO and RPO.
•Coordinated and led software ESCROW agreement implementation, perform end-to-end testing and QA to ensure usability of software in case of ESCROW release.
•Provided CIO and Executive team with weekly updates on accomplishments, plans, outages, completed and planned changes.
•Managed outsourced service providers, and align their operations with industry best practice standards, by implementing enhancement project including:
•Elimination of single points of failures in the TPA infrastructure by implementing redundancy and resiliency across business critical systems.
•Reducing external resource dependency by hiring in-house resources for mission critical roles.
•Executing contractual rights of external vulnerability assessment and penetration testing by external auditors.
•Implementation of Business continuity and Disaster recovery for the systems based on a scheme wide Business Impact Assessment (BIA).
•Built and started the implementation of the IT department’s roadmap for the National Health Insurance company to prepare the organization for future insourcing of IT systems from technical capabilities and human resource perspective
Recruited by investors to establish an IT solution provider startup based in Qatar.
•New venture development: Co-founded and launched an IT solution provider startup focused on serving Qatari market, with focus on Infrastructure professional services and consulting, outsourcing, professional trainings and Mobile application development.
•Designed the startup short-term and long-term strategies: defined key global partnership opportunities, and potential client’s opportunities.
•Business Development: Partner with founder to identify new business prospects, determine value added services, and partnership possibilities to stabilize and leverage startup ability to compete in the market. Participate in key meetings with clients and prospects.
•Staff Administration: Hired staff in various managerial and technical positions.
Designation Chronology:
Jan '10 - Present: Manager - Infrastructure Systems
Jun '07 - Jan '10: Senior Specialist Systems Administrator
Recruited and promoted to drive a major transformation of team, stabilize and modernize infrastructure, and introduce standards and best practices to aid the bank’s growth.
Key Initiatives:
Developed disaster recovery procedures to restore IT systems in accordance with Bank’s BCP.
Managed Infrastructure projects and designed virtualized systems.
Patched and upgraded OS with minimal downtime.
Utilized ITIL to perform capacity management while preparing Temenos Hardware requirements.
Results:
Automated manual and repetitive tasks using proper tools.
Reduced operational cost by proposing initiatives like architectural simplification, negotiating contracts and utilizing the high operational expenses to finance new initiatives.
Over performed for three consecutive years.
Reduced operational risks by replacing outsource staff in sensitive areas with the Bank employees.
Managed the technical operational activities and monitor performance against SLAs and KPIs
Played a lead role in the IT due diligence assessment / merger evaluation with another bank in Qatar.
Conduced a comprehensive IT assessment of an acquired Bank, and suggested IT integration architecture model.
Utilized virtualization and private clouds to reduce OPEX by 35%.
Implemented, maintained and administered 100+ physical servers with heterogeneous OS's.
Recruited to establish a new bank by identifying business infrastructure requirements, evaluating and selecting IT Infrastructure solutions required by the new entity and aid in recruitment of new it team.
Key Initiatives:
Developed policies, procedures and run book for IT Infrastructure Team.
Analyzed user system and application needs, determined and evaluated alternative solutions and approaches to meeting those needs, and selected the optimal technology solution.
Identified key cutting-edge technologies to be utilized to reduce CAPEX and OPEX.
Established relationships with vendors, prepared RFP’s and prepared technical requirements documents.
Results:
Designed, implemented and configured the server side and client side infrastructure.
Identified Operating Systems to be used based on selected banking applications, compatibility and stability.
Deployed all Infrastructure systems and applications, such as active directory, exchange server, file server and virtualization platform.
Reduction in CAPEX by 25%.
Defined the outsourcing requirements for the bank.
The Company is a leading solutions provider for Banking and Finance, Telecommunications, ERP, CRM, E-business and Networking.
Key Responsibilities:
•Conducting regular system checks and preventive maintenance to ensure optimum system performance.
•Managing network systems and infrastructure, as well as analyzing and drafting technical documentation, maintaining system logs for root cause analysis on customer support issues.
•Performing Solaris tuning and hardening, user administration, file system backups and restores as well as preventive maintenance of system health checks for sun server and storages.
•Hardware support for various Sun SPARC Server Models and Tape Libraries.
Initiatives:
•Utilize system deployment tools such as jumpstart & JET to speed up deployment at customer sites.
•Utilize JET and system alternate boot methods to perform system patching and upgrade with minimal downtime.
•Utilize RBAC to replace root access sharing.
Results:
•Speed up server deployment and patching by 30%.
•Root access sharing was eliminated and replaced with segregated user account per engineer.
•Expert in Solaris 10.
Key Projects to Credit:
•Designed and implemented entire IT Infrastructure for a new bank - Including directory services, email services, file services, and security applications.
•Designed private cloud environment, migrated physical servers to virtualized environment with a virtualization ratio of 1:8 - utilizing vSphere, vCloud and SRM.
•Designed and deployed a monitoring tool to achieve a planned uptime of 99%.
•Core Banking Project: designed and built complete new infrastructure for T24 Temenos solutions to migrate from SAP.
•Authentication integration across heterogeneous platforms - integrated Solaris login with Microsoft directory services.
•Designed and Implemented backup and restore strategy for multi-tenant environment covering 300+ servers.
•Resilience and High Availability - designed and implemented clustering technologies to maintain business critical environments.
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