I am a passionate technologist that enjoys learning how technology really works. My speciality is enterprise network engineering, however, I have significant experience working across a broad range of enterprise technologies and vendors. I’m constantly striving to learn modern methods, approaches and technologies to conquer business problems and ensure that the network is a stable and secure business enabler.

I started my IT career over a decade ago supporting primarily Microsoft technologies however I’ve moved progressively into infrastructure and Network Security as my main focus. Being Cisco trained in both enterprise and design to professional level has served me very well and has provided the required experience to pivot to support complex mixed vendor environments. I currently hold a PCNSE in Palo Alto firewall technologies which has become my preferred weapon of choice in the fight against the plethora of security risks any modern connected business will face. I am also currently AWS solution architect associate certified. With the ever increasing importance of cloud technologies, the need to provide secure cloud design and connectivity has become a significant benefit to business especially considering the popular shift to OpEx cost models. With the speed at which cloud environments can be deployed and utilised, cloud is proving to be an incredibly valuable asset to businesses moving ideas to reality faster than ever. Core data center and campus network technologies continue to remain an important focus yet I also find myself drawn increasingly to open-source operating systems and software. I continually test new solutions, architectures and technologies, especially in the virtualisation, networking and security areas. An example of vendors I have experience with: Cisco, Arista, Dell, Palo Alto, Juniper, Check Point, Sophos, Synology and ZyXel. I also have experience across a wide range of commercial and open source operating systems including, Windows, Linux (RPM and debian based distros), VMware, OpenBSD, IOS, IOS-XE, NX-OS, OS10, EOS, PAN-OS, VyOS, pfSense and OPNsense.

I also have considerable skill in python programming and have utilised the language to gain real-world results simplifying highly complex tasks. I’m also a huge fan of NetBox which paired with Python can streamline the management of complex data centre environments and all of the inherently linked technologies required.

I’m also a fan of Zabbix which provides both agent based and agent-less monitoring of complex networks utilising a distributed architecture. I’ve got significant experience with the platform having implemented Zabbix from scratch in a distributed architecture to ensure extensive monitoring of production networks.

I also have broad experience across a range of other technologies in a DevOps capacity, namely ansible, docker, traefik, lxc containers, wordpress, postgres, GitLab, git etc.

I am accomplished at delivering innovative complex systems for a range of customer verticals and take great pride in the quality of my work.