About
Hi, I’m Chris Coombes!
With over 16 years experience in the Information & Operational Technology industry across a range of roles, I have a deep understanding of Enterprise Infrastructure, Public Cloud, Data Centre Management, Systems Administration and Team Leadership.
I have a key focus on delivering robust, secure, scalable IT solutions that offer significant business value now and into the future.
A self-motivated individual with an appetite for continual learning, with key areas of interest being Dev Ops, infrastructure as code and cloud technologies. I thrive on being an engaged team member with a passion to empower and motivate others by sharing my knowledge and experience.
Competencies: Team Leadership, Project Management, Infrastructure Management, Systems Administration, PowerShell Scripting, Disaster Recovery, Datacentre Consolidation & Microsoft 365.
Certifications
FEBRUARY 2021
MS-900 - MICROSOFT 365 FUNDAMENTALS, MICROSOFT
NOVEMBER 2020
AZ-900 - AZURE FUNDAMENTALS, MICROSOFT
OCTOBER 2020
PAGER DUTY FOUNDATIONAL PRACTIONER, PAGER DUTY
Experience
MARCH 2021 – CURRENT
LEAD OPERATIONS ENGINEER, NEXON
In my current role as a Lead Operations Engineer at Nexon, I’m responsible for the efficient delivery of IT service into key customer accounts. The position is aligned with a “Care Team”, which involves providing leadership, support and mentoring to a team of highly skilled operational engineers.
Overseeing the delivery of service into a range of customers across various industries including but not limited to, Critical Infrastructure, Health Care, Higher Education and Transport. Ensuring that all tasks are managed inline with the ITIL framework and are actioned appropriately.
A key driver of mine is achieving customer satisfaction and aligning business objectives and contractual obligations.
I also act as an escalation point for resolving issues affecting the efficient delivery of all operations across all customers.
Key engagements I have been involved with to date;
- Critical Infrastructure - Nexon has been engaged by a major critical infrastructure provider to coordinate the replacement of a large control system. I am the Lead Engineer responsible for managing the infrastructure implementation and for building out the team and processes to support the project through the delivery phase, system go-live and beyond.
- Data Protection - Lead Engineer responsible for transitioning the management & monitoring of the Microsoft 365 and Dell Networker backup environments of large higher education providers into Nexon(CSA) managed services. This included analysing multiple disparate environments to ensure compliance with best practise, identifying risks with the current implementations and providing corrective action recommendations.
- Essential 8 - Primary engineer responsible for the analysis, design, and implementation of the required security controls to raise a large customer’s ASD Essential 8 maturity level. Provided a detailed design and guidance on the required ITSM practises to ensure that the maturity level is maintained.
- Azure - Responsible for transitioning to managed services the monitoring and day to day management for multiple Azure customers.
- Virtualisation - Took on the day monitoring and management of a large health care providers multiple most, multi sites vsphere & commvault environment. Provided guidance on capacity planning and hardware upgrades.
MARCH 2017 – MARCH 2021
INFRASTRUCTURE LEAD, OVATO
In my role as the Infrastructure Lead, I was responsible for leading a skilled team of System Engineers spread across Australia and New Zealand. My responsibilities included technology support and maintenance across 2 primary physical datacentres and 5 remote sites, developing technology strategy and project management / delivery.
I successfully streamlined operations and reduced costs through standardising & centralising IT infrastructure & systems, combined maintenance contracts and consolidated licensing agreements.
Key Projects: Datacentre Relocation, Data Protection & DR, WAN Consolidation, Office 365 Migrations, Domain Migrations / Datacentre Restructures, Team Culture
NOVEMBER 2014 – MARCH 2017
INFRASTRCUTURE & SUPPORT MANAGER, IPMG
Managed a team of Engineers and Client Service staff responsible in a shared service model for the infrastructure and service delivery for multiples sites across Australia.
The environments consisted for 4 datacentres supporting 250 VMs on multi host vSphere clusters backed by Dell & EMC storage and multiple networks & firewall vendors (Juniper, Cisco, Dell, HP).
Key Projects: Office 365 Migration, WAN consolidation, Firewall replacement, Service Delivery Ticket Management & Process consolidation, Backup environment refresh.
AUGUST 2008 – NOVEMBER 2014
SYSTEMS ADMINISTRATOR, HANANPRINT
Responsible for managing infrastructure, network & systems across 2 data centres (Sydney & Melbourne) and service delivery for the entire organisation including 3 Client Service staff directly reporting to me.
Keys projects: Data centre & office newtwork relocation, Implemented vSphere envirnment, RemoteApp application delivery, Application development (ASP.net, C#)