Sole hands-on responsibility for the architecture, implementation and support of our global cloud and on-premise infrastructure and data platforms, bringing scalability, HA and DR functionality to our new and existing products.Bringing DevOps mindset and processes to the organisation via automated tooling to take the business to the next level and ensure we remain at the competitive edge in the crowded SaaS space.Undertook upgrade of our SQL Server estate to 2016 from 2005, coupled with consolidation and a migration into Azure using FCI clusters backed by S2D to improve availability and performance and simplify administration.

Full operational responsibility and accountability for all hardware and software deployed in our five data centre locations across Europe and Asia, directly leading a team of twelve 1st and 2nd line system engineers, database administrators and developers using Scrum for project delivery.Delivered a 62% saving of £79,000 on data centre hosting costs by successfully managing the transition from a traditional physical infrastructure of approximately 200 servers to a highly consolidated hybrid cloud model (utilising Hyper-V and VMware on premise and AWS and Azure in the public cloud)Spearheaded the technical move into China with an ad-hoc multi-office team. Rollout of all corporate and core systems was undertaken within timescales and 18% under budget.Transitioned our internal tools estate away from Windows/SQL Server to Linux/MySQL to save on licensing and hosting costs, moving some of these tools into AWS where appropriate.Migrated the SQL Server backend for one of our core products to Azure SQL DB to reduce administration overhead and provide managed high availability, whilst also reducing on premise footprint and hosting costs.Provided change management procedures where none existed and pushed hard for more accountability and ownership of issues across departments, improving fix times for system failures markedly.Improved our overall system SLA within twelve months from 98.31% to 99.84% by implementing new procedures and methodologies.Proactively pulled together a global ad-hoc team to design and implement the successful joining of the two complex and disparate corporate estates post acquisition.Transformed a badly run and poorly received corporate IT function across our European offices, with overall staff satisfaction increasing from “poor” to “excellent” as a result.

Responsible for winning two large contracts by designing and developing a custom data warehouse web portal using PHP for use by customers, who could use parameterised pre-programmed queries and extract procedures against our data warehouse appliance and download data either via web browser or FTP whenever, and a frequently as, they needed.Significantly improved database performance by setting up a cross-office team to completely redesign and rewrite poorly implemented data schemas, add appropriate keys and indexes and add error checking and transactional logic to stored procedures within a new release of our core software product.Utilised SQL Profiler and Windows Performance Monitor to perform a full audit of all existing SQL databases and implemented various optimisations based on my analysis to increase the performance of these systems.Created numerous core system status dashboards using SSRS and wrote custom SQL monitoring code for integration into main operational monitoring suite which lacked built-in SQL monitoring support.Offloaded ad-hoc and scheduled data analysis onto dedicated reporting server populated using transactional replication from core production databases, thus providing guaranteed baseline performance in the production environment and less restrictive reporting access to our data consumers.Established regular workshops with development teams and produced system documentation to provide support and training in areas such as index and query optimisation, good database design and developing code to work in highly available environments.

Migrated our 8TB historical archive of inbound source data onto a Dataupia data warehouse appliance, providing vast speed improvements to data retrieval and opening up many more options for data delivery to our customers.Successfully designed and implemented upgrade plan to migrate our estate of 18 SQL Server 2000 instances to SQL Server 2005 whilst keeping downtime to an absolute minimum.Redeveloped our core product data management ETL processes into SSIS to leverage additional functionality and ease future maintenance, management and growth of these processes.Designed, implemented and managed transactional data replication scenarios across LAN and WAN, enabling seamless load balancing for front end applications.Transformed SQL disaster recovery thinking, moving away from log shipping and instead moving towards database mirroring along with replication strategies in concert with code changes in front end applications.Overhauled database backup and restoration thinking and procedures, implementing centralised management of backup and recovery operations along with backup rotation and off-site storage.

Led successful redesign and implementation of broken and misconfigured Active Directory services with minimal downtime and interruption to employees and systems.Brought externally hosted DNS onto premise to save costs and simplify management.Spearheaded move away from software firewalls onto Cisco physical appliances, improving resilience and stability markedly as a result.Migrated away from traditional dialup services for remote access towards clientless VPN, cutting costs considerably, improving security and simplifying the remote user experience.