Riyadh, Saudi Arabia
At SPL|سبل, my leadership in Infrastructure Operations is defined by a steadfast commitment to service excellence and a strategic approach to global service management. Our team has consistently maintained customer service level objectives, leveraging Site Reliability Engineering tools for outstanding delivery performance. Significant Achievements: • Closed all the Cybersecurity vulnerabilities backlog from “Criticals” and “High” that were pending for the last 2 years in 5 months. These cybersecurity vulnerabilities exposed Applications, Infrastructure and Endpoints to serious risk of penetration and fraud in the IT landscape. Completed. • Spearheading the Migration program from the Legacy Datacenter to the New Colocation Datacenter built completely on Nutanix platform. This covers the vast migration of more than 900 VMs from VMware platform to Nutanix covering more than 30 legacy applications. Completed. • Led the technical team that migrated the legacy data center network gateways to the new CISCO ACI technology gateway. This involved a major outage of 12 hours, application testing, VPN re-configuration, re-establishment of high availability firewalls in the DC, DMZ and Extranet zones plus the re-provisioning of government customer network in the Extranet zone. Completed. • Leading the technical team to consolidate the non-production workloads and migrate to the Cloud. Strategy, Assessment and scoping of the design implementation. In progress. • Re-established and provisioned Security Controls like EDR Netwitness and Tenable for Cybersecurity monitoring in the Datacenter. • Communicated to the Business Stakeholders and managed the “downtime” associated with Application and Network cutovers. • Hired and mentored Saudi nationals into the Infrastructure, Network and NOC support teams to strengthen governance and process protocols for migration of legacy applications to Nutanix as part of a technology refresh program • Led the ITSM implementation covering SLAs, Alerts, KPIs and other metrics for the entire IT landscape. •Nurturing KSA tech talent •Deliveribg with KSA tech talent and planning for succession
Significant Achievements: • Closed all the Cybersecurity vulnerabilities backlog from “Criticals” and “High” that were pending for the last 2 years in 5 months. These cybersecurity vulnerabilities exposed Applications, Infrastructure and Endpoints to serious risk of penetration and fraud in the IT landscape. Completed. • Spearheading the Migration program from the Legacy Datacenter to the New Colocation Datacenter built completely on Nutanix platform. This covers the vast migration of more than 900 VMs from VMware platform to Nutanix covering more than 30 legacy applications. Completed. • Led the technical team that migrated the legacy data center network gateways to the new CISCO ACI technology gateway. This involved a major outage of 12 hours, application testing, VPN re-configuration, re-establishment of high availability firewalls in the DC, DMZ and Extranet zones plus the re-provisioning of government customer network in the Extranet zone. Completed. • Leading the technical team to consolidate the non-production workloads and migrate to the Cloud. Strategy, Assessment and scoping of the design implementation. In progress. • Re-established and provisioned Security Controls like EDR Netwitness and Tenable for Cybersecurity monitoring in the Datacenter. • Communicated to the Business Stakeholders and managed the “downtime” associated with Application and Network cutovers. • Hired and mentored Saudi nationals into the Infrastructure, Network and NOC support teams to strengthen governance and process protocols for migration of legacy applications to Nutanix as part of a technology refresh program • Led the ITSM implementation covering SLAs, Alerts, KPIs and other metrics for the entire IT landscape. CTO, CTO, VP, GM, IT OPERATIONS, IT ADVISORY
Implemented strategies to improve employee retention, enhance customer satisfaction ratings, address skill gaps through training initiatives, ensure compliance, and resolve customer escalations efficiently. Strengthened operational processes to enhance delivery performance and ensure compliance with governance standards. Collaborated with customer management to prioritize and allocate resources effectively to align with business strategies, taking into account diverse cultures, time zones, languages, and processes. Led the definition of cloud services and capabilities for customers, including setting metrics, engagement models, BC/DR protocols, identity management, and operational monitoring. Monitored and maintained customer service level objectives (SLOs), service level indicators (SLIs), and service level agreements (SLAs) through robust monitoring mechanisms and SRE tools. Oversaw CSAT quality scoring, engagement models, BC/DR capabilities, and operational monitoring dashboards to ensure optimal performance and customer satisfaction. Managed finances, built cohesive teams, and streamlined operations to drive efficiency and success.
Director – Infrastructure Services 22 Clients, Fixed Price Projects, Managed Services Contracts. No CEO escalations from any customer. Developed a roadmap in conjunction with the other Technology leaders to assess and “future proof” the on-premise and cloud environment, considering both company objectives and operations (people, process, and technology) in determining the ‘how to’ phases and operational modes Overseeing infrastructure delivery operations for multiple customers with on-premise data center and cloud environment architecture/design with migration to service provisioning and operations. Some of our customers are now transitioning to multi-cloud with Kubernetes as the orchestration plane. This sets us up for the most exciting cloud journey with Data, AI and ML coming into play I do white-boarding solutions with CIOs/customer. I discuss service operations and implementations around containerization, micro-segmentation of the network, how to get rid of IP-based Authent8/AuthZ techniques, how to encrypt data in-transit without re-writing the app, how to publish/subscribe to certificates for identity/session.
SaaS Operations – Overall leadership and direction to establish and manage a global support service organization (Offshore and Onsite) for Enterprise Applications Oracle Sales Cloud, Configure Price Quote (CPQ), Data warehouse, ERP, Order Management, Order to Cash, Salesforce and Workday using SRE and ITIL methods Infrastructure Services – Networking, cloud services, IOT, Constant Improvement Service Operations – Global Service Desk functions, end user hardware, ticketing services, asset management Identity and Security Management – provisioning, deprovisioning and access control services Service Management – IT service operations tools, processes and automation, desktop/help desk services ITIL and SRE - Leadership and direction to SRE staff that are responsible for Incidents, Automation and reliability for core services, distribution, and application network elements and related interfaces Drive best practices in Site Reliability Engineering and insure Secure, Scalable, Performant, and Highly Available Service (CIO level Dashboard– Latency, Errors, Traffic and Saturation) Responsible for automation, monitoring, alerting, & logging. Working knowledge of configuration tools like Puppet, Chef or Ansible. Capacity and resilience management of the PaaS Manage the production environment for the PaaS, ensuring compliance to Service Level Agreement. Establish required metrics for the measurement of the service performance Drive the onboarding of applications on to the production Platforms environment, ensuring all best-practices are adhered Renewal of applications using Docker containerization technology in a DevOps environment (Kubernetes)
In-charge of a 517 team of onshore/offshore (mixed location) engineers providing managed services for infrastructure and applications related to Technology domains that include platforms & OS (Linux / Windows, citrix and exchange), cloud computing services, virtualization technologies (VMware), telephony & voice, network, storage technologies, disaster recovery implementation, production systems and Operations Center/Service Desk. Transitioned the Offshore support model to all onshore in US due to government Nuclear Regulatory concerns from Entergy. All engineers were mandated to be either citizens or green card holders. 300+ positions offshore eliminated and moved to onshore. Daily Service Review Call, Weekly SLA review meeting, Monthly Security TVM vulnerability patching review, Monthly Critical Incident Review, Monthly performance review with customer Over seeing the Automation DevOps team of 35 engineers using Config and DevOps Automation Tools such as Ansible modules/run-books for Automatic provisioning of storage, provisioning of VMware instances, automatic closing of System generated alerts/tickets, closing of multiple tickets in ServiceNow related to incident (Change management, patch management, and automated ticketing for events engineering) Used automation to close many system generated tickets from ServiceNow as part of Service requests such as server provisioning, storage provisioning, VM server setup and install – plus a long list of ITOM related tasks that were automated using ServiceNow tickets and implemented with Ansible My projects team moved 74 applications from Entergy into containers and moved that into production in a run environment with monitoring. And now we are going to move 300 to 400 applications into containers. Provide thought leadership and service improvement plans across the entire ITIL/ITSM change, patch, incident and problem management stack on the infrastructure side. client was - www.entergy.com