IT Solutions Architect

In today’s day and age, you need to be vigilant with the applications or services that are out there, breaking down technical solutions to improve business development, offering technical guidance on networking solutions, product plans, Hardware, software, and roadmaps that will be robust and cost-effective to the company.

With over 13 years of experience in the IT industry, I have been exposed to various projects from small to big SME’s that needed to adapt to new technologies.

Planning, designing, and implementing standalone Wi-Fi hardware to integrating with some of the biggest retail shops in the South African market to utilize the assets that are in place. Creating a Wi-Fi network that eases the sign-up process for new clients opening accounts with one of the first paperless banks in South Africa located in over 700 stores.

The Project involved many aspects of implementation and logistics of the Hardware and Software.

• Deploying high availability hotspot servers with DNS Round Robin.
• Enterprise Hosting environment for the hotspot servers.
• Creating quality assurance of the devices being configured and deployed to the relevant stores – each device had to be tested.
• Making sure that deadlines are met within the timeframe.
• Logistics and management of the devices being deployed.
• Adherence to the security policies and meeting the requirements of the client’s data on the servers.
• Planning and implementation of an APN (Access Point Name) for the multiple sim cards that had been deployed in the various stores.
• Designing and implementation of the RADIUS server managing multiple sim cards in a central location.

The following project was one of the fortune 500 companies that is Chinese state-owned, it involved designing and implementing a network for the relevant branches in each region in South Africa to manage Internet connectivity from a central location in an enterprise data centre with layer 2 connections to each branch saving them money by not having separate Internet connections at each branch on Layer 3.

The project involved the designing and implementation of the MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching)

• Feasibility for each branch to see if it would be possible for layer 2 connectivity.
• Managing the times and dates of Installation of the Fibre to each branch.
• Configuring the data centre router with the various cross-connections and BGP (Border Gateway Protocol) routes to allow the networks to communicate with each branch.
• Configuring each branch router to allow the various subnets to communicate back to the BGP routes to the data centre.
• Meeting uptime and downtimes according to service level agreements.
• Managing staff as well as travel and logistics for the branches to be live alongside remote quality assurance on the lines.