Professional Qualifications

Chartered Software Engineer
Member of the British Computer Society - MBCS
Past Member of the Association of Computing Machinery – MACM
Past Member of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers – MIEEE

Consulting Assignment Summary

Consulting assignments have ranged from short term troubleshooting on systems for simple and complex network problems e.g. firewall misconfiguration, through medium term engagements where companies need additional skill on projects e.g. assisting a large insurer to turn round a development shop that was failing to deliver, to long term engagement involving strategic support over a number of years e.g. providing advice on global network architecture to a large trading bank.
Recent assignments have included remote reconfiguration of a multi-site distributed system that had been set up incorrectly. This included reconfiguring the edge and internal routers; fixing the firewall configurations to provide secured access and build trusted tunnels between the sites; installing and configuring network management and monitoring stations. The later is based on a product developed by Coherent Technology Limited to enable proactive monitoring and management of distributed systems

CASE STUDIES

Single Sign On Infrastructure

Architect and lead developer for the design and implementation of a single sign-on solution deployed at a large global investment bank. The project involved providing infrastructure and supporting deployment and diagnostic facilities for the integration of the disparate UNIX platforms into the Active Directory used by the client as their main source of authentication and authorisation. Responsibilities included: planning, designing and implementing the extension of the AD schema to support the new facilities; evaluating the supporting software for reliability and effectiveness within the global environment and providing tools to monitor the effectiveness of the deployment and the health of the running system once deployed.
This has tied in with the project where I took a lead role on designing tools to support identity synchronisation between separate systems within the firm to support a global identity management facility.

Fault-Tolerant Systems Development

Lead Architect providing fault tolerant systems for leading UK companies since 1991 building on experience gained from work on the Odyssey project for the European Commission and the UK government,. Recent work has hardened open source platforms to support firewalls, network monitoring functions, and distributed applications. Network architecture has also been developed that represents the state of the practice in Internetworking and supports failure resilient network topologies.
Technologies utilised in this include: Cisco IOS programming on small and medium size routers and switches; BGP, PI space IP and AS number facilities for managing ISP relationships; DNS support for Internet facing and Intranet facing facilities; DHCP support for the Intranet; SNMP based monitoring utilising the Nagios framework; Linux kernels supporting firewall extensions via Shorewall, IPSEC VPN technologies via OpenSwan; and user layer proxies such as Squid, FTP-Proxy, Sendmail and Xinetd port-forwarding.

Global Mail Backbone

Technical Architect and project manager designing and directing the development of a global mail backbone based on Internet standard software. This backbone was deployed in 6 locations worldwide and included redundant nodes to ensure continuity of service even in the presence of failures. The system was designed, developed and deployed within a calendar year of project start, without disrupting previously installed systems. The major achievement of the project was the success in designing a system that could move from a pre-existing environment to the new environment without serious disruption to service and without compromising the functional or non-functional attributes of the new system.

Year 2000 Test Laboratory

Technical Architect and Team leader of a 50+ man-year project that constructed and operated automated test laboratories to prove the year 2000 compliance of a global trading bank’s system components. The project required innovative technical approaches as well as application of sound engineering principles. The complexity of producing a complete model of a global infrastructure, that can be rapidly reconstructed on a regular basis (weekly) led to new technologies and applications of existing management features in the operating systems and networking arena.

Mixed network integration

Technical lead/Project Manager for a number of projects that integrated MS Windows desktops; UNIX desktops with Windows and UNIX based server systems. Primary requirements included provision of a unified, managed desktop environment based on UNIX and MS Windows with access control enforced in both domains seamlessly, regardless of desktop.
The projects required the development of architecture to isolate failure. A workgroup-based system provided failure tolerance in case of loss of connection to the backbone service.
Most recent work has focussed on Network Management and monitoring of mixed media technologies with a focus on VoIP management in a traditional IP network architecture.

Assignment History

(This Candidate has recently been shortlisted or contracted for the following people4 assignment)

• Open VMS Systems Administrator - must be willing to travel/ relocate for a period of 6 months at least.

Freelancers, Contractors & Consultants that have been shortlisted with this Candidate: