Phil Bristow

Once is luck, twice is tested, thrice? This should be automated.

IT Engineer specializing in networking and virtualisation with many years of experience in supporting different industries including hospitality, healthcare, law, and retail. Able to design and implement cost-efficient yet resilient solutions to real business problems, I ensure your infrastructure solves a problem, not become one.

With a broad experience and a quick understanding of most technologies, I strive to build redundancy into all environments and developing automated processes wherever possible.

Experience

Infrastructure Support Technical Lead

CPS

My role at CPS includes a rather diverse range of responsibilities, allowing me to work with the full network stack, from switches and firewalls to Azure and wide area networks. Additionally, I work across most aspects of Office365 and handle server or container administration for both Windows and Linux when the opportunity arises.

February 2023 - Present

Senior IT Engineer

Harwoods Group

While bringing a somewhat archaic network into the 21st century by architecting a VPLS to SDWAN migration I designed, planned and executed a total server migration from ESXI in a hosted DC inhouse onto purpose-built Hyper-V cluster with full DR capabilities including onsite and offsite replication, failover to a secured Azure tenancy and private immutable storage across segregated networking.

Other projects include optimising IT spend across virtualised services by moving to Windows Server Core and Ubuntu Server LTS, and various cyber security projects that cannot be detailed.

August 2020 - January 2023

Senior Service Engineer

Oriium

While serving my time on a MSP service desk and hitting my personal best of 10,000 ticket closures in a year, I developed several automations to reduce repeating tickets being created from various monitoring alerts. Reducing overall inbound tickets by just under 20%

September 2017 - August 2020

IT Consultancy (Sole Trader)

Beta Six

Working for myself I curated a modest list of local business customers for ongoing managed services including web development, infrastructure maintanance and network installations.

I had a fantastic customer base and managed projects of anything from complete office re-fits with new networks to cloud hosted SaaS applications. However I had to relocate due to family commitments and instead looked for a more permanant job with annual leave. Something that I had not had for several years.

May 2015 - September 2017

Skills

The tech I make dance

Both Windows and Linux (Ubuntu primarily) server administration
Active Directory based domain / forest deployment and administration including AD / CA / RADIUS / IIS and other roles.
Virtualisation using VmWare's ESXI, Microsoft Hyper-V Server and recently moving into Proxmox
Cloud hosting on Azure (Preferred), AWS and Google Cloud
Firewall deployment and maintenance using Sophos, Cisco Meraki, Unifi, Fortigate, Watchguard and PFSense.
Network deployment and maintenance using Cisco Meraki, Unifi, HPE, Aruba and Ruckus
Containerization in Docker and Proxmox
Powershell fanatic! I have over 500 powershell scripts in my box of tricks and plenty of storage free for more!

Interests

Aside from camping (my wife doesn't call it camping when there is no tent, but I maintain tents are optional extras), I'm a regular at a local airsoft field and climb when the opportunity presents itself.

I'm an aspiring cook who refuses to follow recipes, interminable tinkerer and most importantly Dad!

Certifications

Azure AZ-104

Microsoft - Issued Nov 2023

Azure AZ-900

Microsoft - Issued Dec 2021

Okta Certified Professional

Okta - Issued Apr 2021

Sophos Certified Architect (XG Firewall v17.5)

Sophos - Issued Nov 2019

Sophos Certified Sales Consultant

Sophos - Issued Jun 2019

Mimecast Gateway Technical Professional

Mimecast - Issued Apr 2020