Data Protection Subject Matter Expert · L3 Harris
Data protection policies and compliance frameworks, sensitive-data inventories, impact assessments, security audits and incident response.
Information Technology · Professional
Experience Built Around Resilience.
Data protection, disaster recovery and IT leadership, grounded in a career that began in the Royal Air Force.
Protecting data. Keeping organisations running.
My work brings together the technical detail of backup and recovery with the people, processes and decisions that keep an organisation operating. I have designed storage architectures, tested disaster recovery plans, managed global infrastructure operations and led teams supporting production cloud services.
I am a dual UK-US citizen and emigrated from the United Kingdom to the United States. My career spans both countries, alongside projects across Europe and internationally.
Across military, commercial, government and academic environments, I have stayed close to implementation: understanding how systems behave, documenting how they should be operated, and helping teams recover when something goes wrong.
From the RAF to enterprise infrastructure
In the military I was part of a team who developed computing infrastructure for deployment to bases worldwide. My involvement covered design, installation, testing and deployment, followed by years of support, upgrades and training. That experience established a practical discipline: a backup strategy must be supported by recovery testing and people who know how to use it.
After leaving the RAF, I progressed from storage helpdesk support to technical consultancy. Later projects included global disaster recovery testing and backup architecture for Unilever, infrastructure consolidation at Scottish Power, storage projects at the Royal Bank of Scotland, and architecture and migration work in Belgium and the Netherlands.
EMC: from quality assurance to solutions architecture
After emigrating to the US, I joined EMC in Santa Clara as a Principal Software Quality Assurance Engineer. I designed and executed tests for unreleased versions of NetWorker with Data Domain systems, covering backup, cloning, staging and recovery across virtual tape libraries, CIFS/NFS storage and native Data Domain integration.
I became a full-time EMC employee and progressed to Principal Solutions Architect. My work covered NetWorker, Data Domain, Avamar and Data Protection Advisor, from architecture assessments and solution design through implementation, documentation and disaster recovery testing.
Alongside delivery, I supported pre- and post-sales engagements, mentored engineers, contributed to EMC professional certification examinations and presented at EMC World. On individual projects, I managed teams of up to 40-50 people.
Recent experience
Hybrid Cloud Manager · ivision Scale
Led five engineers supporting backup and disaster recovery services, production AWS and Azure infrastructure, and Commvault, Zerto and Veeam environments.
Global Operations Manager · Signode Industrial Group
Led infrastructure operations through four team leads, with responsibility for recovery strategy, critical incidents, service levels, operational budgets and SOX audit participation.
Infrastructure and recovery · Selective Insurance and Commonwealth of Pennsylvania
Backup architecture and consolidation, recovery policies, automation, data archiving and governance, alongside Agile delivery and technical documentation.
What I bring to a project
My experience spans solution design, capacity planning, backup and recovery, business continuity, incident and problem management, and governance. I work across technical and management teams to turn requirements into systems that can be supported, tested and improved.
That includes hands-on work with UNIX/Linux, scripting, enterprise storage and cloud platforms, as well as the documentation, training and change management needed to make technical delivery sustainable.
Education and professional development
I hold an MSc in Information Technology, specialising in Information Security, from the University of Liverpool. My professional qualifications include EMC certifications, Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer, SAFe Advanced Scrum Master and ITIL certification.
Work with PlotLost
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