While it is not possible
to list all projects that I have
completed over the past 25 years,
below list of selected project experiences
shows what we can do for you
Developing an entreprise-wide DRP
Developing an entreprise-wide disaster recovery plan for a national critical infrastructure provider
DISASTER RECOVERY
08/2023-12/2024, Belgium
Supporting PwC in this business continuity project for a provider of critical infrastructure. Earlier mergers resulted in a complex organization with many business-critical applications running on an even more complex IT environment supported by multiple IT service providers.
My role was to focus on the disaster recovery aspect:
- Streamlining existing DR documentation
- Updating the DR strategy and alignment with the BC strategy
- Integration with incident management and crisis management procedures
- Identifying dependencies and developing a recovery sequence across applications, integrations and infrastructure
- Development of an entreprise-wide DRP for their 16 most business-critical applications
- Developing the recovery capabilities looking at 3 major disaster scenarios: primary DC outage, ransomware attack and strategic provider outage.
- Developing of an actionable DR test plan for the underlying IT infrastructure, integrations and the selected critical applications
- Ensuring compliance of the developed plan with ISO27001 requirements on business continuity
- Approach based on ISO22301 (although client had no intention to obtain formal certification)
Supporting a Qualified Trust Service Provider with their business continuity, information security and IT risk & compliance
project focus on:
SECURITY DISASTER RECOVERY COMPLIANCE
12/2021-12/2024, Netherlands
This is a combination of multiple projects at the same client; what started as a 3-month project turned into a long term engagement addressing different client needs.
A summary of key activities:
- Develop and implement a Business Continuity Management System
- Develop yearly DR test plans and conduct testing
- Extend and improve an existing Information Security Management System to meet ISO27001 and ETSI 319401, 319411-1 and 319411-2 requirements
- Acting ad interim Security Officer
- Maintain ISO27001 certification, facilitate external surveillance audits
- Migrate the ISMS to the new version of ISO27001:2022
- Prepare for ETSI certification to become a qualified trust service provider; support during stage 1, stage 2 and certifications audits
- In my Risk & Compliance Officer role, establish a Compliance Management System to ensure the organisation keeps its license to operate as a qualified trust provider
- Performing internal audits with regards to ETSI, GDPR, Consumer Protection, Contractual Obligations
- Own the risk management process by maintaining the risk register, conducting risk management trainings and organising yearly risk reviews
Datacenter strategy
Advising a public entity on the future of their datacenter landscape
project focus on:
CLOUD DATACENTER
INFRASTRUCTURE
12/2021-04/2022, Belgium
This client needed an answer to their question of where to host and run their 3 environments: in their own datacenters, in a private cloud, in the public cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) or using a combination of all these.
Interesting aspect was that, due to a recent company merger, their IT consisted of 3 distinct sub environments each having their own non-functional requirements.
Main project activities:
- Analysing application portfolio and IT environment and mapping these to the existing datacenter landscape and service delivery models
- Capturing business requirements and definition of evaluation criteria
- Identification of possible DC solutions and delivery models and combination into potential scenarios
- Qualitative evaluation of scenarios
- Quantitative evaluation of scenarios based on a high level financial analysis
- Motivation and justification of scenario scoring and evaluation
- Development of the recommended target datacenter landscape
- Consolidation into a management report
- Presentation to management team
Datacenter industry study
Evaluating the strengths and weaknessess of a country as a datacenter hub
project focus on:
CLOUD
DATACENTER
01/2021-04/2021, Iceland
A governmental agency wanted to reinforce the country as a datacenter destination, compare the position of Iceland against Ireland and understand its specific strengths and weaknesses for attracting more datacenter investments.
To meet client expectations, the content of the deliverable was defined jointly with representatives from the power, telco and datacenter industries.
The project scope included:
- Review of the global trends influencing datacenter growth
- Analysis of the Icelandic datacenter market today and main players’ ambitions going forward
- Impact of the new IRIS subsea fiber cable
- Analysis of Ireland as a European datacenter hub
- Comparing country value propositions
- Financial benchmark: building and operating a datacenter in Iceland vs. Ireland
- Conclusions and recommendations to improve the position of Iceland in the market
- Report presentation to the stakeholders
- Presentation of report highlights to the Icelandic government to help create a momentum for change
IT infrastructure manager (ad interim)
Due to the sudden departure of the IT infrastructure manager and IT architect,
this client needed urgent help
to manage his team and ongoing projects
project focus on:
INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE SECURITY
06/2020-12/2020, Belgium
The recently appointed IT director was facing serious challenges after the lay-off of his IT infrastructure manager and his lead IT architect.
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The company had been hit very hard by a ransomware attack which had brought down manufacturing for several weeks. After one full year of rebuilding, the IT team was still struggling to rebuild the complete IT and OT environments with manufacturing spread across 4 countries.
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The attack happened in the midst of an acquisition by another company which was put on hold during an external audit ordered by the European Commission to look into competition aspects. The auditor was performing an in-depth investigation into all systems looking for sensitive manufacturing, supplier and client data and required ring-fencing this data before any take-over could take place.
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Under huge pressure from their internal clients who complained about the strictness of the newly applied security rules making it hardly workable for them to do their daily jobs.
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Urged to reduce costs of the external consulting company that had been running large portions of the IT for more than a year since the attack. Many responsibilities had to be passed back to the already stressed IT-team.
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And then, in the midst of this all, the IT director had to lay-off his IT infrastructure manager and his lead architect without any hand-over taking place
This proved to be more of a people project than a technical project. Rebuilding the IT infrastructure team (18 people) was one of my main objectives in order to help the IT director get things back on track.
SLA development
Development of a service level agreement for managing the IT services provided by one ministry to another
project focus on:
INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE DATACENTER
02/2020-03/2020, Cyprus
The ministry was relying on another ministry for the provision of its IT services. Motivated by an initiative of the European Commission to improve the reliability of their IT services, clear agreements were required to manage the relationship between the ministries.
A service level agreement had to be developed, and agreed on between both parties, describing the service catalogue,the service level objectives, the service level targets and the SLA governance.
Main tasks performed:
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Identification of stakeholders and services being provided
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Organisation of full day client workshop for information gathering
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Definition of roles and responsibilities
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Definition of SLA objectives
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Definition of SLA measurement and monitoring
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Development of draft SLA document
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Organisation of full day client workshop to find consensus on draft SLA content
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Iteration and development of final SLA document
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Submission, obtaining sign-off, project closing
Disaster recovery
maturity assessment
Assessing an organisation's
DR readiness
project focus on:
INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE DATACENTER
DISASTER RECOVERY
04/2019-06/2019, Belgium
Triggered by an IT audit, the board of directors asked to assess the state of the disaster recovery capabilities in the organisation. Given the criticality of the infrastructure managed by the organisation the recoverability of its ICT environment was of the utmost importance and the client wanted to have an independent review done.
Main tasks performed:
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Tailor assessment approach and questionnaires to client situation and needs
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Organise data gathering activities (workshops, interviews and data center site visits)
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Assess the maturity of multiple DR aspects including overall readiness, people, applications, infrastructure and data centers
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Develop management report featuring key findings, recommendations for improvement and feedback towards audit committee
Data center incident response
Helping a bank move forward after an unplanned data center outage
project focus on:
DATACENTER SECURITY
10/2018 – 11/2018, South Africa
This investment bank in Johannesburg suffered an unplanned data center outage after an issue with the fire suppression system. The bank wanted independent expert advice on how to move forward after this incident:
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Advice on the data center in general, as the role of the data center was changing since its design and implementation 10 years ago;
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Advice on the fire protection system, to define what changes were required before returning to normal operations and to avoid this occurring again.
Main tasks performed:
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Analyse incident series of events
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Advise on next steps in terms of data center fire protection
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Assess data center current state (overall reliability, security, scalability) and advise on suitability to meet future business needs
IT asset management
Helping a bank to obtain
a complete and accurate CMDB
project focus on:
INFRASTRUCTURE PEOPLE
05/2018-08/2018, Belgium
This bank was going through a transformation shifting more responsibilities from the Infrastructure team to the Application teams. They wanted to improve agility as well as reduce infrastructure cost and planned for the Application teams to own and manage their own infrastructure stack.
Before this could happen, the approximately 6000 servers needed to have clear and unambiguous owners within the organisation. Resource usage information had to be made available allowing the teams to right-size the virtual instances thus freeing up resources back into the private cloud and consequently reducing costs.
The client project sponsor was located abroad and needed help make this change happen. The client insisted the team to be local in order to make sure to match the local culture, to help reduce resistance to the upcoming change and to overcome the 'stickyness' (sic) of the local organisation.
Main tasks performed:
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Understand client’s IT organisation and analyse the platform landscape (Windows, Linux, AIX, Solaris and storage)
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Develop an approach and build a communication plan to engage with the application teams spread across 25 different application areas
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Initially organize bulk data gathering sessions and gradually switch to a more personalized approach to ensure reaching 100% server ownership
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For the different platforms investigate the options for capturing resource usage data
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Initiate gathering of resource usage data with visualization on central dashboard
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Provide monthly management status updates
Data center construction supervision
This bank in Kuwait lacked in-house data center expertise for the construction of their new main production data center.
project focus on:
DATACENTER SECURITY
09/2017-03/2018, Kuwait
This bank in Kuwait lacked in-house data center expertise to supervise the construction of their new main production data center. They hired Dick to be their trusted advisor and to protect their interests throughout the detailed design and implementation of the data center.
Main tasks performed:
- Review the contractor proposal for gaps with the bank’s requirements
- Partiipate in detailed design workshops on layout, electrical, cooling, connectivity and security
- Review design submittals and provide recommendations for acceptance or rejection
- Review contractor project planning and monitor progress
- Advise on adherence to applicable industry standards and best practices
- Perform construction site visits
- Facilitate resolution of technical challenges and issues during the construction
- Review contractor invoicing and advise on the release of payments
- Protect against scope creep
- Advise on acceptance during testing and commissioning
- Provide monthly management status updates
ISO27001 maturity assessment
Due to the sudden departure of the IT infrastructure manager and IT architect, this client urgently needed an experienced manager to help manage the team and ongoing projects
SECURITY COMPLIANCE
DATACENTER
06/2017-08/2017, Belgium
This IT service provider wanted to improve its information security management and obtain an ISO27001 certificate for the datacenter services they are providing to public organisations and communes. I helped them take the first steps by assessing their current situation with regards to ISO27001 compliance, performing a maturity scan of the ISO27002 domains and developing the recommendations and next steps towards the implementation of an ISMS, including ISO27001 certification.
Main tasks performed in this information security consultant role:
- ISO27001 audit dry-run to establish the baseline in terms of actual compliance with the standard (requirements are either: not met, partially met, met to a large extent, met)
- Organising workshops covering the 14 ISO27002 domains
- Maturity assessment of all domains using CMMI maturity levels
- Developing assessment report
- Presenting report highlights to the management team
IT Strategy
Consolidating multiple
departmental data centers
project focus on:
DATACENTER INFRASTRUCTURE DISASTER RECOVERY
09/2016-12/2016, UAE
A governmental holding company in Dubai wanted to create a department acting as shared IT service provider for all its subsidiaries. This required the consolidation of several existing IT environments from different group companies spread across multiple data centers.
Tasks performed:
- Data gathering workshops
- Data center site visits and assessment
- Development of new data center landscape
- Definition of new data center requirements
- Data center provider evaluation
- Target state recommendation
Helping a telco provider
improve their hosting service
.
project focus on:
DATACENTER PEOPLE
04/2015, Zimbabwe
A telco provider with strong ambitions to grow their IT hosting services required an objective review of their main data centers in Harare.
The assessment report provided valuable insight in how they could improve the reliability of their data centers by identifying major vulnerabilities in their infrastructure and ways to address these. I also helped improve the relationship between the client’s Business, IT and Engineering functions as the workshops brought people together.
Tasks performed:
- Data gathering workshops capturing business goals and data center requirements
- Data center site visits and technical assessment
Design of a flexible data center for a bank in the UAE
project focus on:
INFRASTRUCTURE DATACENTER
01/2015 - 02/2015, UAE
The bank wanted to build a new future-proof data center to support its IT department which was growing towards becoming a service provider for different group entities.
Tasks performed:
- Validation of the company’s IT strategy
- Review of new building design documents
- Alignment of data center scope with general building contractor
- Data center solution design (architectural, electrical, cooling, racks, datacabling, security, monitoring)
Security systems analysis for a petrochemical company
project focus on:
SECURITY
10/2014 - 12/2014, Saudi Arabia
As part of the review of the security processes and organisation in the company, an analysis of the security systems was required for two office locations and one petrochemical production plant near Dammam.
Tasks performed:
- Data gathering workshops
- Site visits to office and plant locations
- Review of provided location and security systems’documentation
- Creation of evaluation report including risks, conclusions and recommendations for improvement
- Management presentation
Building a bank’s new main data center and disaster recovery site
project focus on:
DATACENTER DISASTER RECOVERY
01/2013 - 12/2013, Rwanda
This bank invested in a new main production data center while at the same time implementing a small remote disaster recovery site for its critical applications. The new infrastructure was implemented in less than a year, vastly improving the reliability of the IT systems supporting their 193 branches serving their clients.
Tasks performed
- Detailed solution design for main data center as well as disaster recovery server room
- Data centers construction - turnkey solution including civil works, electrical, cooling, security, racks,
- monitoring and cabling
- Testing and commissioning
Work in progress, come back soon for more sample projects
or get in touch with us