Storage Area Network Experts in Frankfurt

NTT Data Center Replacement – €20m

• Strategy & Requirements: Data Center migration and exit strategy for ING Germany, including definition of project scope, objectives, KPIs and comprehensive requirements across cybersecurity, physical security, regulatory and group-wide strategic standards.
• Regulatory & Risk Governance: Regulatory and supervisory requirements, risk assessments, ECB notification and audit-ready documentation, achieving formal sign-off with no material findings.
• Procurement & Vendor Selection: RFP and selection of Data Center providers, migration specialists and secure transportation partners in cooperation with Procurement and in line with ING Group requirements.
• Commercial & Contractual: Complex contract negotiations with selected providers, coordinating Legal, Procurement, Business, Security, Compliance (incl. DORA) and Senior Management across both organisations.
• Infrastructure & Data Center Delivery: Data Center fit-out and implementation of base technology, including internal networks, external connectivity, cabling and core services, aligned with required security standards.
• Migration & Transition: End-to-end planning and preparation of application and infrastructure migrations, including environment-specific runbooks and coordination with Release Management, followed by handover to the internal ING organisation for execution; migration execution achieved zero unplanned downtime and no customer impact.
• Financial & Program Control: €20m Program budget with governance of expenditure, forecasts, milestones, dependencies and critical paths, maintaining delivery within approved budget and timeline parameters.

• Error analysis and fixes including performance optimization of the in-house developed platform API
• Change and incident management in day-to-day operations
• Responsible for compliance with security and compliance requirements
• Vendor management for software development and maintenance
• Planning and execution of migration of legacy services to a cloud native platform

Role in the project: project staff, implementation team

Used skills: requirements analysis, IT service and application management, IT operations, error analysis and performance optimization, software maintenance and lifecycle management

Project environment: Cloud Native Platform (Kubernetes, Crossplane, AWS, ArgoCD, Grafana)

• Holistic responsibility for modernizing and expanding federal networks and upgrading critical data center and telecom infrastructure in the high-security agency environment of BDBOS
• Planning and management of the expansion of national BOS network infrastructure in the VS-NfD/KRITIS environment with technical decision authority at the architecture and component level (Cisco, Layer 2/3, WAN redundancy)
• Planning, tendering (EVB-IT/UVgO) and oversight of the upgrade of security-critical telecom infrastructure for emergency call 110/112 (ACD)
• Capacity planning, rack integration, structured cabling, power supply, cooling concept (CRAC/In-Row) and DCIM monitoring for data center expansion
• Building the IT department from scratch: structures, governance, processes, team recruiting, vendor selection and long-term IT strategy
• Planning and managing infrastructure and application migrations: migration strategies, batch planning, hypercare stabilization and rollback concepts
• Creating vendor-neutral specifications (telecom systems, signature solutions) according to EVB-IT and UVgO; contract award and vendor management
• Setting up a secure IT environment according to BSI basic protection, ISO 27001 and VS-NfD; developing IT security concepts and CMDB analyses
• Hands-on program leadership: decision papers for management and steering committees, risk management, reporting and change request control

• ITSM consulting, analysis and optimization of IT capacity with BMC TSCO / BMC Helix
• Drafting "Governance guidelines for operational capacity management"

• Recognition of national notified bodies
• Preparation of cybersecurity competency reports
• EU Radio Equipment Directive

• Implementation of specified DevOps solutions to automate infrastructure (Terraform, Bicep, CloudFormation, Ansible) on-premises datacenter (Ovirt, Proxmox, Ceph Cluster, MinIO) and private cloud.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of CI/CD DevOps pipelines (GitLab, GitFlow) to support development process (Artifactory, Prometheus, Istio, service mesh, Helm Chart, OpenShift (Red Hat Enterprise) / Kubernetes cluster), Red Hat Satellite.
• Administration, setup, monitoring and patching of Linux infrastructure based on Red Hat Enterprise for Dev, Test and QA.
• Use of Scrum and Kanban methods.
• Administration, configuration and implementation of security standards for deploying on Dev, Test, QA and Prod stages of the new ePA applications.
• Development of new plugins and add-ons needed on current infrastructure.
• Database support.
• Data analytics support (Python, Spark, Pandas, Power BI, Splunk Enterprise).
• Implementation of best practices for DevSecOps and BizDevOps using GitOps (ArgoCD), Streamlit framework, Semaphore Ansible UI.
• Configuration and testing of iperf, uperf, sysbench using benchmark-operator for external source data and IoT/MDM devices, creating reports via ELK / OpenSearch.
• Building a new Databricks platform to collect and analyze big data from different sources and IoT devices into Hadoop framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Power BI, Apache Airflow).
• Building backend data aggregation and processing to automate configuration deployment between different OpenShift clusters and big data framework (Python, Pandas, PySpark, Apache Spark, PostgreSQL, Django 2, Ansible Automation, Jira JSM).
• Building a new ML pipeline platform using Kubeflow, TensorFlow, KServe.
• Data extraction, transformation and loading from different data sources including structured and unstructured data to analytic DWH / big data cluster using Python, Pandas, Polars, Power BI, Django backend and PostgreSQL.
• Setup of new DevOps Test and QA HashiCorp Vault cluster for PKI and IAM.
• Configuration and testing of automated patching based on CVSS score, SIEM-integrated CVEs.
• Use of Nexpose and InsightVM to scan vulnerability events in network, host, container and application.
• Design and implementation of secure and scalable AWS architectures including VPC, EC2, S3, RDS and Route53 and similar setups on Azure and GCP.
• Automated system provisioning and deployment using CloudFormation templates.
• Configuration of IAM roles, policies and permissions to ensure secure access control.
• Patch management, backup automation and disaster recovery setup on AWS infrastructure.
• Monitoring and optimization of system performance using AWS CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor.
• Support of VMware services (vSphere, Aria, Horizon) and the virtual desktop environment.
• Development and maintenance of CI/CD pipelines using Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD and AWS CodePipeline with interface to Nutanix.
• Configuration of AWS CloudWatch to monitor application performance and system events.
• Planning and execution of migration of on-premises applications to AWS cloud platforms.
• Deployment of containerized applications using Docker and Kubernetes in AWS environments.
• Deployment of internal software packages between availability zones using AWS CodeDeploy.
• Building and deploying ML models using Scikit-learn, XGBoost and Spark MLlib including hyperparameter tuning, model evaluation and production deployment.

• Oracle databases 11g, 12c and 19c RAC
• Installation, configuration and deployment of Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g & 12c (WebLogic, SOA, Oracle Forms and Report Server, etc., OBIA)
• Administration of Oracle 11g, 12c, RAC and 19c
• Applying patches
• Installation, configuration and deployment of Tomcat
• Oracle tuning
• The system includes several production, QA, test & development Oracle databases and WebLogic application servers 11g & 12c

• Hybrid Cloud Administration (Cloud Transformation)
• Azure Cloud Administration
• Azure Entra ID user administration
• Reporting
• License reviews
• User and group management
• RBAC integration
• Policy management
• VM administration: setup of VMs, configuration of scale sets, configuration of replications, creation of backups, manual installation
• Azure Bastion
• Privileged access identity management
• Documentation
• Azure Security Center: monitoring security posture and recommendations to improve security
• Microsoft 365 administration: MS Intune administration (Bitlocker policies, distribution, device management, group management)
• MS365 Defender (Defender for Endpoint, threat management, EDR solution implementation, threat detection through investigations)
• Defender for Office 365 (protection of Office 365 tools against phishing, malware, and other attacks)
• Defender for Identity (identification, activity monitoring)
• Defender for Cloud Apps (application monitoring and protection)
• Windows Active Directory, DHCP, DNS, policies, Baramundi, SCCM/MECM, VMware, WSUS, Sophos
• Exchange administration: rule creation, setup and deployment of mailboxes, mailbox migration, mail tracking, mailbox conversion, report generation
• Windows AD administration: user management across the structure, device management, attribute management, group management, organizational management, troubleshooting
• Group Policy management: modifying, deleting or creating policies, assigning and organizing policies, documentation and reporting
• Manual installation & imaging: new imaging, image creation, manual maintenance and updates, documentation of various enterprise applications
• Bitlocker configuration, BIOS and firmware configuration, troubleshooting and collaboration with level 3 support, MBSA reporting, WSUS monitoring, system and event management, troubleshooting across the IT infrastructure
• Network management (including SWIFT network): MAC address filtering, network switch configuration, port management, switch patching
• VMware ESXi/vSphere/vCenter administration: VM management, troubleshooting, virtualization solutions, updates and maintenance
• Virtualization & cloud: Azure, Citrix, VMware, VirtualBox, ESXi, Hyper-V, VMware AHV, vulnerability management, migrations
• Identifying, assessing and remediating security vulnerabilities on hybrid endpoints through regular vulnerability assessments and patch management
• Backup & recovery: Teams administration, data migration, SAN, SharePoint administration, NAS, Exchange administration, cloud backup: policy creation, mailbox migration
• IT security: firewall, antivirus, Azure, MS365 Security Defender: monitoring, mailbox setup and implementation, mail tracking, mailbox conversion, report generation
• IT service management: team meetings, report analysis, documentation, analysis
• Other: monitoring progress against goals, ServiceNow, HPSM, prioritizing activities, JIRA, MS365, integration of requested projects, MDM, TeamViewer, AnyDesk, Adobe, PowerShell, CLI, CMD
• IT service desk: Exchange, JIRA org administration, SCCM shell: user management, device management, project management, ticket reviews, user training, ticket handling, change management, permission management, VIP support
• Facility management: coordination with building management/technical teams, organizing technology for conferences, guest access, employee access
• Nutanix/VMware administration: provisioning and setup of Nutanix clusters, installation and configuration of Nutanix AHV, VMware ESXi & Hyper-V, infrastructure maintenance and operations, upgrades and patches for Nutanix clusters, planning and implementing backup solutions, installation and configuration of VMware ESXi hosts and vCenter servers, hybrid environments