Andy Cooper

Innovation-led Technical Architect with 25+ Years' experience in IT. Proven success enhancing business delivery by improving IT Infrastructure, solutions design and service delivery.

Technically astute, analytically minded and MBA-educated with ten years senior leadership expertise in promoting pioneering innovation across Information Technology to optimise user experiences. Ambitious, dynamic, relishes challenges and is quick and willing to learn and effectively apply processes. Enjoys maintaining awareness of new and emerging developments in cloud and on-prem technologies.

• Defined creative solutions for business problems, holistically addressing functional and non-functional requirements.
• Building consensus for the proposed solution through engagement and communication with stakeholders.
• Effectively addressed stakeholder expectations and clearly describe solutions using industry standard modelling notations.
• Contributed to the practice development through thought leadership and development of innovative services and offerings.
• Participated in business development activities, bids and development of innovative offerings.
• Built client relationships, and established credibility by demonstrating knowledge of various aspects of architecture.

Experience

Key achievements

• Research, compared and defined a solution to meet the requirement of non-impacting application releases using a Blue-Green approach, removing the need for maintenance windows.
• Developed designs for Active-Active configuration across physical datacentres in a hybrid networking environment between AWS and on prem datacentres.
• Evaluated a technologies sector client AWS infrastructure, identified areas of improvement and implemented re-design of their AWS deployment, yielding significant savings.
• Effective stakeholder management bringing together multiple teams and stakeholders to design and implement complex solutions across the business.
• Developed and implemented a custom bespoke tool using AWS to assist clients with tracking their cloud costs.
• Researched, compared, tested and prototyped management reporting solutions.
• Supported internal capability development of cloud technology utilising AWS infrastructure.
• Extensive domain knowledge of cloud technologies including AWS and Azure, designing highly available, highly scalable solutions.

Key achievements

• Actively contributing to the academy programme.
• Developed new materials for AWS history and technical session for prospective students.
• Co-founded 'IAM AWS Obsessed' LinkedIn group, connecting people studying AWS.

Key achievements

• Significantly improved information management and streamlined 6+ systems to integrate into a single data source.
• Developed and implemented college-wide strategy for learning technologies, resulting in streamlined learning through the coronavirus lockdown providing continuous education to all users.
• Proven track record in implementing online learning platforms and regularly share expertise with other organisations .
• Developed and implemented key systems and strategies to meet the Government’s testing requirements through the COVID pandemic.
• Successfully negotiated numerous key contracts for services, including software and hardware.
• Led the tender process and directed strategic procurement of computer hardware on behalf of 11 colleges, delivering a 10% expenditure reduction in a demanding financial, multi-customer environment.
• Successfully managed change which confidently challenged the status quo to overcome barriers to positive change in an historically change-averse setting.
• Designed and implemented numerous online systems, including an appraisal scheme which has realised significant change in outputs throughout the organisation.
• Project managed site wide developments including both construction and infrastructure specifications.
• Designed and project managed a bursary management system enabling students from disadvantaged backgrounds access to funds on their ID cards; successfully adapted and installed system in neighbouring college.

Key achievements

• Turned around historic decreasing student enrolments by pioneering locally delivered IT diploma, resulting in improved student numbers, satisfaction and retention.
• Authored and presented network infrastructure and disaster recovery plan as well as website refresh to governors.
• Cut maintenance costs by 20% while improving efficiency and end-user satisfaction following discrete system installation.
• Contributed to a 10% revenue increase through shared server hosting, resulting in improved KPI performance.
• Built, maintained and nurtured relationships with fledging companies within college business incubator while supporting successful start-ups across IT architecture, network infrastructure and media.
• Improved budgetary controls having developed enterprise solution enabling Cost Centre Managers to access budgets in real-time while discovering and analysing expenditure miscoding.

Core Compentencies

• Technology change
• Analytical thinking
• Partnership-building
• Stakeholder engagement
• Problem Solving
• Business transformation
• Data gathering and assimilation
• Influencing and negotiation
• Decision-making
• Education funding methodologies
• Online learning tools
• Procurement processes

Skills

• VPCs
• Elastic Cloud Compute (EC2)
• Elastic IPs
• Elastic Load Balancing (ELB)
• Autoscaling
• Simple Storage Service (S3)
• IAM
• Billing and Budgets
• Route 53
• Relational Databases (RDS)
• Non-relational databases (DynamoDB)

• C#
• VB and VBA
• Python
• HTML
• PHP
• SQL
• PowerShell

• Network design and implementation
• Switch configuration and implementation
• Firewall configuration and implementation
• Web content filtering
• IP addressing and subnetting

• Windows Server 2012, 2016 and 2019
• Micrsoft SQL Server and Report Builder
• Group Policy Management
• Active Directory
• Linux
• Azure
• 3CX VOIP
• Kubernetes

• Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors
• VMWare ESXi
• Hyper-V

• Microsoft Office suite, including Visio
• AutoCad
• Microsoft Teams
• Archi
• Draw IO

Education

Certifications & Professional Development

• AWS Authorised Instructor
• AWS Solutions Architect Associate
• AWS Certified Cloud Practioner
• Azure Fundamentals
• CompTIA Cloud+
• BCS Foundation Certificate in Digital Solutions Development 2020
• BCS Essentials Certificate in Artificial Intelligence
• Association of Accounting Technicians (AAT) Level II
• Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)
• IOSH Health and Safety for Senior Executives/Managing Safely Leadership and Senior Management
• NEBOSH Certificate in Health and Safety

• QWIKLABS Achievements
• Conducting Investigations
• Data Protection and GDPR
• Recruitment and Selection
• Safeguarding
• Manual Handling

Interests

My passion for technology keeps me occupied outside of the workplace and I support two local businesses with their IT needs. This involves infrastructure installation, server and workstation configuration, diagnostics and general advice. I use my personal time to keep myself abreast of the new and emerging technlogies.

Originally beginning my education in electronics and electrical engineering, I enjoy working on various projects to keep my mind engaged including the implementation of an opensource home automation system. This system allows custom developments and integrations. I combine my knowledge of electronics and coding to implement systems such as ambient reactive backlight for my home entertainment system and heating thermostat control.

I follow a number of sci-fi and fantasy genre movies and television shows and I spend a large amount of my free time exploring the latest technology advancements in the front-end web development world.

I also enjoy sporting activities such as ten pin bowling, badminton and running.

Working with the Norfolk Library Service, I initiated a dialogue to promote the library service and the services it has to offer to young users. I played a key role in setting up the system and processes to automatically enrol students into the service and use their college ID card for membership.

Personal Projects

This project was for a local fabrication company. I installed a QNAP 2TB NAS drive for their local storage needs. The drive was configured as RAID 1, giving redundancy. I also installed an external USB drive to the NAS and configured a five-day backup cycle. Although robust, this solution did not address the possibility of a fire or something similar that would knock out all of the data. To address this, I configured a one-way synchronisation task, from the NAS to an S3 bucket using an IAM user and access keys. The bucket has a policy to move the data to S3 infrequent access after 30 days to help minimise costs. Account management and budgets were also configured to ensure costs were effectively monitored.

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During the AWS academy programme, we were given a brief to setup four Virtual Private Clouds (VPCs) and configure VPC peering between them all, then provide screenshots as evidence. I decided to develop the brief further, by configuring EC2s in each subnet. I setup a private subnet in each VPC and placed an EC2. I configured one public subnet in the first VPC and configured an EC2 Bastion server. From that server, using the shared keys created, I could login to each EC2 in each VPC and use ping to test connectivity. Finally, I documented the entire process and configuration.

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The community spirit within the AWS academy programme inspired me so much that it urged me to give something back. With the encouragement from fellow AWS students, I led a zoom training session configuring an EC2 to be a webserver taking advantage of the free tier. I took a slightly different approach and decided not to use an elastic IP address to remove the possibility of incurring costs. I had to have a way to check and ensure if/when the public IP address changed, the webserver would still be available via the domain name. The session included examples of how to use Python and ‘Cron’ jobs to update a DNS record and renew the free 90 day TLS certificate 10 days before it expires.

If interested, click to take a look at the guide!

As a project for a further education college, I designed a network test environment based on VMWare's ESXi community edition. The brief was to enable students studying computer science and the new digital T-Levels to be able to test networking and client/server scenarios. The project was an interesting challenge as the students needed access to the test system from a standard workstation; however, the workstations/servers within the environment were not allowed to interact with college systems. Three firewalls had to be configured to successfully route and restrict the traffic.

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Another project for the same further education college was to look at their 3CX VOIP system and where it sat in within the network infrastructure. The system had been configured to use the same VLAN as the main network. To improve security, I re-designed the infrastructure to separate out the VOIP system into its own VLAN. This involved adjusting the Hyper-V networking environment, re-configuring the firewall, adjusting the DHCP settings to enable telephony devices to auto select the new VLAN when plugged in. Finally, as an additional security measure, I installed an additional firewall between the server and the external connection.

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A personal project this time to show my love for all things technology. This project is used to enhance my home entertainment system and uses a standard LED strip attached to the back of the TV to react and synchronise colours to the image being displayed on the screen. The project uses a Raspberry Pi, and a Nodemcu microcontroller, along with a video splitter and USB capture card. I used the opensource Hyper-HDR software and made a few custom modifications in the form of scripts to better integrate it into my home automation system. I believe the result is quite effective and mimics the same technology produced by Phillips and their range of Ambilight TVs.

Sample Video 1

Sample Video 2

Another personal project, this time using the opensource platform Home Assistant (HA). Running on a Raspberry Pi HA allows the integration of different home automation technologies including IoT devices into one central platform enabling the freedom of choice for the best technologies per device type. HA also offers the ability for custom modules. I pride myself on the ability to problem solve and use technology to achieve a solution. As an example, writing a custom Python script to “scrape” the web interface from my Denon AV receiver to detect an HDR signal and then adjust the ambilight (described above) accordingly; or developing my own boiler thermostat radio control system using MQTT and a Nodemcu microcontroller, and integrating with an online calendar as a scheduling tool.

To help immerse myself into the AWS world I have been using the Qwiklabs platform extensively to learn and test the different technologies and services available. I have enrolled and completed a number of the Quests to help progress my knowledge and experience. Qwilklabs is an excellent solution to develop the skills and understanding as how to apply AWS technologies.

Click to check out the badges achieved thus far