GenXer
About Me
Work & Experience
Computacenter 10/01/2024 - 07/28/2025
Data Protection Consultant
A customer facing specialist role focused on delivering secure, compliant data protection and disaster recovery architectures. Working with customers and vendors to implement solutions meeting their data protection and recovery needs. I have attended monthly strategy meetings with Veeam and other vendors, gathering updates on new and roadmap changes to products and collaborating on strategies to deliver these to customers. Responsibilities: ● Consult and deliver on implementation and optimisation of data protection architectures for a variety of applications and platforms such as virtualisation, containers, physical, SaaS and Cloud. ● Review existing solutions and advise augmentation to improve cyber resiliency position. ● Collaborate with cross-functional teams to integrate data protection capabilities into solutions and services, contributing to the overall strategy and service development. ● Staying current with data protection, classification, and disaster recovery technologies, and applying new tools and techniques in line with industry regulations/frameworks to solve complex problems. ● Customer facing skills with the ability to propose solutions to improve efficiency and scalability.
Clouddirect 10/01/2020 - 09/02/2024
Backup, Storage & DR Technical Specialist
A very broad, but highly technical role, championing the use of a wide range of modern and increasingly cloud-based (Azure) backup, continuous data protection and Disaster Recovery solutions for customers. Working alongside a multinational team, provide validation of all internal and external projects prior to going for bid review and also ensuring the on-boarding is run smoothly. Alongside this, I am tasked with a wide range of customer and solution engagements including technical vendor relationships, customer pre-sales, solution design, project delivery and handover into our Managed Service Support Teams. Whilst maintaining configuration management and technical management of both cloud and local/hybrid infrastructure. Responsibilities: ● Leading Backup and Disaster Recovery major incidents through to restoration of services. ● Maintained service availability though monitoring and incident response. ● Leveraging built in or Building dashboards to ensure visibility for stakeholders at different levels. ● Communicate and engage with key vendor partners to ensure maximum value. ● Principal technical lead regarding complex Backup, Disaster Recovery & Continuous Data Protection systems. ● Building Runbooks and Identifying vulnerabilities within existing processes or practices. ● Creating/gathering evidence from Disaster recovery testing to ensure we are achieving RTO’s and RPO’s ensuring compliance targets are met and realistic.. ● Communicate and engage with managers at all levels globally. ● Assess pre-sales projects from various sales and commercial teams. ● Designed and implemented client-facing technical solutions to agreed deadlines, cost and standards ● Managed risks and reduced failures through scheduled maintenance, patching and testing cycles of established processes and enhancing where necessary. ● Identifying risks to customers services/data or internal services and proposing plans/actions to resolve or limit them. ● Assess and review new products or tools to be used within the team and the wider company to help drive up efficiency. ● Sourcing new vendors and collaborating with them to develop, evaluate and test their products to ensure fitness for purpose, this has led to the successful adoption of this product as part of the company portfolio.
Data Continuity Group 12/01/2017 - 10/01/2020
Professional Services / Solutions Architect
Self-driven and very technical but highly fluid role where I was required to undertake many roles and deliverables ranging from Delivery of services, Pre-sales, project management to vendor management. Defining and instilling the standards required for many of the support work practices being undertaken. Responsibilities: ● Reconfiguration internal backup infrastructure to ensure better ransomware resilience and built in redundancy. ● Driving improvement of internal and client infrastructure to meet new business demands ● Sourcing and evaluating new products to offer to customers, these have included Veeam and Datto. ● Working with the Bid Team to provide high level architecture designs for bid response; ensuring all solutions are supportable, practical and affordable. ● Supporting the bid team on solutions for businesses of varying sizes, from small businesses to companies with a multinational footprint. ● Sourced, reviewed and implemented a replacement (VMware and Hyper-V) for no-longer fit for purpose DR platform’s, reducing the effort levels by up to 60% and creating cost savings and creating time savings of over 90%. ● Maintaining open lines of communication to management on many areas around infrastructure design, improvements, cost savings and security. ● Delivered complex solutions to client briefs within tight deadlines, with self-driven learning of new technologies and products. ● Created the standards and policies for our internal support teams, ensuring they are best practice through ongoing review and revision. ● Automating tasks and seeking out new products or tools to be used within the team and the wider company to help drive up the team's efficiency. ● Implementing training sessions with team members enhancing skill levels of the team and providing further 1 to 1 training on an ad-hoc basis.
Data Continuity Group 04/29/2013 - 12/01/2017
1st Line Technician
With rapid development within a 12-month period to Professional Services and Pre-Sales Technician - the primary contact for Carbonite's Server and Endpoint products for internal and external customers. Responsibilities: ● Perform Pre-sales duties in addition to my 1st Line Technician role ● Software SME instigating training company personnel. ● Maintenance and improvement of internal and client infrastructure to meet new business demands. ● Providing customer support across all roles and clients, requiring comprehensive knowledge of individual client needs for multiple clients. ● Externally recognized by a vendor as a product champion. ● Sourcing and evaluating new products to offer to customers, these have included Veeam and Datto. ● Working with the Bid Team to provide high level architecture designs for bid response; ensuring all solutions are supportable, practical and affordable. ● Supporting the bid team on solutions for businesses of varying sizes, from small businesses to companies with a multinational footprint
Royal Air Force 07/01/2005 - 04/12/2013
Air Defence Radar technician
Working within the defence aerospace environment Employed as a T101 Radar, UHF and VHF communications Technician based at RRH Portreath carrying out 1st & 2nd line Maintenance of all systems on station. Ensuring effective completion of all modifications and fault diagnoses to minimise downtime. Liaising with contractors and 3rd/4th line agencies to ensure work was completed to the necessary standards and with the appropriate documentation. Responsibilities: ● Training senior staff members in troubleshooting of Station systems. ● Proactive maintenance of Tool and Test equipment across the station to ensure fitness for purpose and readiness at any time. ● Communicating with aerospace command on a daily basis to ensure our equipment was up to standard ensuring our radar was within set parameters.
10/03/2005 - 07/01/2009
Eurofighter Engineering Support Systems
Selected straight out of trade training to work at Ground Support System Administrators (GSSA) team working in partnership with BAE Systems Warton on the Eurofighter Typhoon project. Predominantly responsible for the Eurofighter Support Systems. Accolades: In support of the Eurofighter Typhoon Ground Support System: ● First SeniorAircraftman (Technical) (SAC(T)) to Deploy to the USA in support of Exercise Red Flag and Exercise Green Flag. ● First SeniorAircraftman (Technical) (SAC(T)) to deploy to Cyprus with the Eurofighter as a Training Deployment, running the Typhoon Mission Support System solo. Responsibilities: ● Developed the internal instruction manual for Air Incident response to ensure data integrity and consistency in the event of any investigation, including maintaining the chain of custody for any legal actions. ● Assisted in the development of the global training program for new Administrators into the Eurofighter Engineering support systems teams. ● Developed a new data import process using Oracle systems, effectively reducing import times down by 96%. This solution was officially recognized and implemented by BAE systems as the official process. ● Re-design the process documentation for building and deploying a mobile base of operations for the Eurofighter Engineering Support Systems team. This was officially supported by BAE systems and effectively reduced the build time by 60%