Brett Hargreaves Email & Phone Number

Leeds, England, United Kingdom

As the Cloud Practice Lead at Iridium, I work across our clients to help them achieve successful cloud transformations. We work with our customers’ own infrastructure, operations, security, development, and architecture teams, as well as the relevant leadership functions, to review and help define their cloud strategy, taking into account the many competing requirements. We then assist in building out a secure and compliant ‘Landing Zone’ to ensure the correct security controls are automatically in place, or at least visible to the relevant governance teams, whenever new solutions are deployed. This often involves creating automated DevOps pipelines to ensure consistency across environments, as well as generating code libraries that increase the velocity of the engineering and development teams. Finally, we help in the creation of a Centre of Excellence to continually develop and improve not just the technologies in use, but the supporting process, security definitions and assets required to fully utilise them whilst adhering to the rules and governance defined during the strategy phase. These CoE’s then help ensure cloud projects are implemented quickly, efficiently and securely, as well as providing future ways of working to keep everyone aligned. By leveraging our extensive network of associates and in-house expertise we provide different levels of support, from traditional consulting, to team augmentation or even standing up entire project teams.

Leeds

As Azure Principal on the Deloitte North/South Europe (NSE) Cloud team, I am responsible for the governance and development of our internal cloud offering in the Azure space.Working closely with the DevOps teams, CISO, Enterprise Architecture, Solution Architecture, Operations Management and our internal engagement team, I tend to get involved with everything from security, strategy, management, and of course working with the business to help shape the Architecture of their solution.Ensuring security throughout this process is of paramount importance (as it should be), and whilst presenting it's own unique challenges, it ensures our solutions build upon the existing Azure Security principles, strengthening them and providing flexible yet secure systems for our business.At Deloitte we aim to provide our customers with an amazing service, and I'm proud to be part of a team that achieves this whilst also keeping a keen focus on the health, happiness and wellbeing of its employees.

Blackburn, United Kingdom

As a developer and then solutions architect, I improved the development teams' efficiencies by defining and implementing Agile working, and ensured better product quality by ensuring we followed development practices and methodologies such as Unit Testing, OOP, SOLID & DRY Principals.These improvements in service are further driven by researching and adapting relevant frameworks and then rolling everything into standard templates and libraries to be used throughout the team.I lead the adoption of Microsoft Azure and DevOps in order to support our processes and provide better workflow, code quality, testing and release management. I also architected a flexible workflow solution that enabled Capita to build solutions for both internal and external clients in significantly shorter time frames.

Various

Square Connection was my own company as I started out as a free lance software developer - see the projects section for some of the work I got involved in. Eventually I moved into contracting, and finished at Capita who finally talked me into moving back to a permanent role as a Solutions Architect.It is at Capita I built my Azure skills, and started creating online training videos on Udemy on subjects such as MVC, HTLM, Microsoft Dynamics and of course Azure.

A 13 year stint at one of the worlds largest IT companies, I developed my infrastructure architect skills working with clients such as Leeds City Council, Astra Zeneca and DfEE, helping them design and build large scale solutions. We were often at the forefront of new technologies, having the opportunity to get involved with SANs and Virtualisation (VMWare).Whilst working on a long term project with another supplier, It is during this period I started to realise a desire to re-train into software development, specifically in Microsoft technologies.After being TUPE'd to Cap Gemini, I took voluntary redundancy to take one of the biggest risks of my career.

A small 2 year footnote in my career, but one where my confidence grew, and I added programming skills to my repertoire with Visual Basic and Lotus Notes.

Burnley, England, United Kingdom

This is where it all began! Back before the internet was really a 'thing', a fledgling IT company took a chance on shy little geek and offered him a Saturday job selling Commodore Amigas and Atari STs. Eventually this would become a full time role and my passion for all things related to computers took off.I moved from sales into support and networking when the choice for most SMEs was between Windows NT or Novell Netware. I learned how to build PCs, configure windows to squeeze out the last bit of RAM, and even took my first foray in to this HTML thing when working with a printing customer (and 10 years later the gorgeous young graphic designer whom I would often make excuses to help out would become my wife!)Eventually though, after many informative and fun years it was time to move on.