Paul Prior Email & Phone Number

United Kingdom

Working with IFF to migrate their 3rd party MFA/SSO platform to AzureAD/Entra to reduce costs and consolidate providers. Also, providing consultancy on wider security considerations across a global company.

United Kingdom

IT Consultancy providing advice and engineering resource to private and public sector companies, speciaising in Microsoft based technologies.

Working on the IFF (International Flavors & Fragrances Inc.) merger with the Dupont Nutrition & Biosciences division. A global move of people and systems from on-prem domain joined devices to Cloud managed devices on a new network. Initially, the migration was to the WorkSpace One MDM platform, but just before this was completed, all devices had to be migrated again to Intune. In total, 17,000 devices required migrating and the bulk of those had to be migrated twice.I was involved in technical problem solving for the initial migration to WS1 and the lengthy process of readying the Intune tenant for the eventual migration to that platform.Once testing on the Intune platform was completed, I wrote custom software, involving a Windows Service and a user application running in a non-admin security context and communicating over a WCF pipe, allowing users to self-migrate their devices between WS1 and Intune. All 17,000 devices completed the migration ahead of the project planned completion date.I was also able to begin the work on migrating these W10 devices to W11, working with the global support teams to test the application stack, and identify/resolve specific W11 technical issues.

Designing and implementing a new secure Active Directory Forest with CIS Level 2 security for the UK Emergency Services Network.Documenting and introducing a new security delegation model for Active Directory.A management layer using MECM across multiple Active Directory forests with selective trusts.Developed automated deployment for new servers including, AD domain controllers, SQL AlwaysOn Availability Group Cluster, WSUS and MECM using PowerShell scripting.

United Kingdom

Technical lead for M365 migration work for a large multi-national investment bank, including:Global Exchange 2013 to Exchange Online migration (from on-prem in four countries in Europe and Asia).Replacing on-prem Exchange with two Exchange 2019 servers.Migration of Enterprise Vault mail archive data to Exchange Online (30TB+ from four countries).Handover and training to support staff.Microsoft PIM (Privileged Identity Management).Designed and scripted a migration from home drives to OneDrive for Business.

Edinburgh, Scotland, United Kingdom

Acting as the lead technical specialist in delivering a Windows 10 upgrade to thousands of physical desktop and laptop devices along with many thousands of virtual machines (through VMware Horizon).This role involved providing design documents outlining the security profile and the build methodology for the new platform based around a much tighter security framework than was in place for Windows 7. The basis of the design was to match as closely as possible the NCSC security recommendations for the platform. This meant introducing previously unused security features such as BitLocker and Application whitelisting.Deployment was designed to use SCCM OSD technology and it was decided early on that all devices would use the same task sequence to ensure a common build across all platforms.I introduced an automated deployment method for deploying hundreds of VMs at a time to meet the needs of the rollout using PowerShell and VMware's PowerCLI capabilities to create the virtual machines and automatically begin the SCCM build on those devices.The core build was Windows 10 x64 (v1809 initially) with Office 365 ProPlus (Mainly x64) using an M365 license.I also designed the patching process for regular monthly security patching (Using SCCM Automated Deployment Rules or ADRs), and for the feature upgrade process for Windows 10 and Office 365.Much scripting was also put in place for the migration process to ensure that users accounts were correctly set up, including being in the groups for M365 licenses, and to ensure that the UPN matched the primary SMTP mail attribute enable the smooth synchronisation of accounts to Azure using Azure AD Connect.I also conducted a wide-scale knowledge transfer process to the wider IT department including several hours of live online lectures Helpdesk and other support teams got information from this process about new problems they may be encountering and any solutions that had been developed for the Windows 10 deployment.

Edinburgh, United Kingdom

Producing software and solutions for Fujitsu's VCS (Citrix) offering, which is now available to tens of thousands of users in the UK, Channel Island, the United States and beyond.In addition I have an architectural role in designing OS deployment technologies and Active Directory work surrounding the VCS platform.

Warrington, United Kingdom

Providing technical oversight of a Windows 10 rollout on thousands of Microsoft Surface Pro 4 tablets.In addition there is a wider role around future operating models for the department and how it interacts with 3rd party IT suppliers.

Staines

Architectural design work for a large Citrix XenApp solution for several thousand users. Also writing a wide range of software to knit the solution together and to aid with migration, system usage stats, diagnostics, load testing, and Operating System rebuilds.

Edinburgh

Architectural design work for a Fujitsu VDI solution for 55,000 RBS users. Concentrating on Active Directory and Windows 2008 R2 build technologies. Also, creating a wide range of custom built software to plug technology gaps during the project, collect data and solve problems.

The company's Active Directory was suffering from replication issues and a poor overall design based on many historical changes. A new overall design was required and all of the replication issues resolved. Overall, the health of Active Directory needed to be improved to allow future projects to go forward without having to worry about the core directory systems. In addition they required third line support for a whole range of technology, including Exchange 2007, application management, client OS builds, and many others.

Design work for a new Exchange system to replace an outdated legacy system for the MOD finance systems. The design is based on new new high availability functionality of Exchange 2010. The multi-site redundacy nature of the design would allow for a very high level of automatic failover, even with the loss of a whole datacentre.

Providing top level support for the OS build deployment process on all 110,000 BT workstations. The build process is a complex mix of WINPE, WIM images, VBScript, .Net and other technologies.

Providing a third line support path for Sandwell MBC during the tranformation process to their new Exchange 2007/Windows 2003 environment. They were previously cursed with Netware and GroupWise, so they need some help with the transition and on-going support.

I provided broad Microsoft based consultancy for all aspects of the company infrastructure, particularlyin Active Directory and Exchange, but also in desktop management, security and many other aspects on the IT infrastructure.

Day to day third line infrastructure support across a large and complex forest of domains with numerous external legacy domains. I also provided the core technical knowledge and engineering resource for a intricate Exchange migration from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange 2003.

I was soley responsible for all changes made to the 1500 or so workstations in the company. This covered OS design, group policies, software deployments, anti-virus software, and asset monitoring. In addition I provided a third line support channel for high level infrastructure problems and developed systems to reduce support costs and shorten average support call times.

The job was UK wide and covered dozens of different outsourced contracts in public and private companies aswell as several government departments.