Simon Watkins Email & Phone Number

Charlotte, North Carolina, United States

United Kingdom

- Provided leadership to Infrastructure Architecture, Systems Engineering EMEA, Systems Engineering Americas and IT Operations, monitored performance and ensured the consistent achievement of project deliverables.- Delivered several projects including the replacement of a traditional AV solution (McAfee) with Crowdstrike NextGen AV and EDR; the transition from on-prem Exchange SharePoint, SkypeForBusiness to O365 online services, augmenting this with Mimecast Archiving and Continuity; and the implementation of O365, Okta and Zscaler across the entire organisation.- Coordinated supplier relationships, applied a competitive bid process and tailored the support SLAs to better meet business requirements resulting in a 30% reduction in annual maintenance costs.- Completed annual tests to recover key systems with responsibility for the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Plan.- Ensured that the team had the necessary strategies, training and development plans to consistently achieve in-line with business objectives.- Implemented an Enterprise Microsoft Licensing Agreement and worked alongside a VMware US on the implementation of an Enterprise VMware Licensing agreement to reduce admin and reduce costs.- Utilised ITIL methodology for critical Incident escalation, Problem and Change Management.

United Kingdom

- Ensured the availability, scalability and accessibility of the environment, including capacity planning, high availability design, IT governance and security.- Applied PRINCE2 methodology on the delivery of major infrastructure projects including; the Infrastructure Modernisation Programme, replacing 99% of Physical Servers with Virtual Servers using VMWare as well as upgrading core security infrastructure including Anti-Virus, Web Filtering, Email Gateway, VPN Access Gateway with multi factor authentication.- Project managed the BCDR project, resulting in a highly available and fast infrastructure for customers and reduced the space requirement, energy footprint and cost of running the infrastructure.- Developed and maintained the EMEA infrastructure estate to cost effectively support the strategic and operational needs of the business.- Decreased the time taken to resolve incidents and infrastructure IT requests, resulting in improved customer satisfaction and improved IT reputation, within the business.

United Kingdom

United Kingdom

Key responsibilities include analysing systems for security vulnerabilities and performance enhancements. Evaluate existing server and storage architecture for vulnerabilities and failure points and introduce improvements to system performance.Carry out detailed planning to perform scheduled maintenance in the companies data centres. Work with local site leads and IT colleagues to arrange downtime windows to allow the core infrastructure to be updated at a site level.Lead the installation and configuration of new servers and systems in our Data Centres, providing control, planning and direction.

United Kingdom

Provide second level diagnostic support that relates to; Desktops, WAN, LAN, and Servers documentation.Provide onsite support for new site launches, server / network refreshes and support other projects as required.Captures site specific network, server, and end device documentation.

Nuneaton, United Kingdom

Responsibilities include managing a local area communications network (LAN), installing, configuring, and maintaining virtual machines, network security, installing new applications, distributing software upgrades, monitoring daily activity, enforcing licensing agreements, developing a storage management program and providing for routine backups.• To provide 2nd and 3rd line support on a daily basis.• Perform routine maintenance tasks, including installs, configurations, migrations, upgrades of both hardware and software.• Develop and maintain VMs and SANs• Perform routine tasks to maintain user accounts and permissions, including implementing disk space and printer quota policies and run advanced network monitoring reports and utilities.• Develop and follow backup, virus protection and security procedures.• Manage and configure HP and Netgear Layer 2 switches• Detect, diagnose and resolve PC, peripheral and application errors.

Bachelor Of Science (Bsc) Honours, Computer Science

Education record

Education record