Christopher Younger

Independent consultant providing high-level IT Solution Architecture and technical skill set to the small business and startup market.

Projects and Services Accomplished
Cloud / On-Premises Security Assessments
Colocation to AWS Migrations
AWS Enterprise Deployments
Meraki Wireless Deployments
Meraki SDWAN Deployments
Cisco Networking Architecture and Deployments
Observability Architecture and Deployment
Migration to DevOps culture
Technology Operations Leadership Mentoring
Team Training for any deployed solution

• Oversee 50 professionals managing IT Operations including support, infrastructure, telecommunications and site reliability for US based office locations and remote workers.
• Recruited key management and senior staff to maintain team focus on business partnerships and systems integration
• Designed and oversaw deployment of 1500+ unit Meraki network with end-users working from home to support COVID-19 work-from-home protocols enabling business to close offices without missing production
• Migrated critical infrastructure to Amazon Web Services saving $2 million in CapEx over two years.
• Increased internal customer delight (95%+ CSAT up from 85%) by creating Site Reliability team to improve performance of internal applications.
• Oversaw and directed migration from on-premises Genesys PureConnect (Telephony) to Public Cloud-based Genesys Cloud, saving $1 million per year in hardware acquisition and support.
• Revamped ServiceNOW increasing IT Service Delivery and CSAT scores to 95%+

• Responsible for US-distributed 30 person organization and was responsible for all IT hardware, software and associated services. This includes designing, deploying and managing multiple data centers and cloud providers which include Amazon Web Services and Azure for both revenue and enterprise technology operations.
• Recruited key management and senior level technology positions to support IT Service Delivery
• Moved entire production infrastructure from 3rd party hosted solution to two Tier 1 collocated data centers to saving $1.3 million per year of operation expenditures.
• Migrated corporate infrastructure from headquarters building to two Tier 1 collocation data centers increasing performance and resiliency.
• Maintained 99.99% availability of both enterprise and production infrastructures
• Created hybrid cloud strategy and provided pathway to move IT costs from current CapEx model to OpEx while reducing costs by 30% year-over-year and provide scale-ability beyond on-premises data center resource which helped position for a $1.6 billion valuation and sale
• Implementation of DevOps framework and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and allowed business to respond quicker to client needs by increasing frequency of deployments by 20x
• Instituted new Technology Support methodologies to bolster IT Service Delivery
• Designed and oversaw revamps of corporate WAN and office technology suites.

Engaged initially to upgrade VMware Infrastructure from VMware 3.5 to VMware vSphere 4.1. After successful completion of the initial project my engagement was expanded to provide staff augmentation, project management, and strategic planning for disaster recovery, enterprise systems infrastructure support, SAN infrastructure engineering, VMware operations design, documentation of all infrastructure areas, and general “best practice implementations” of critical infrastructure areas.

While at DRT I lead a globally distributed staff of 16. Responsibilities included all Data Center Operations (Servers, Storage, and Networking), Help Desk/Service Desk, Vendor Management, and Infrastructure Disaster Recovery.

Introduced and implemented virtualization for core assets which dramatically reduced hardware acquisition costs, increased speed of service delivery while increasing the customer experience.
Championed the use of open source for all monitoring and internet facing servers. This reduced the cost to scale and allowed the business to be more competitive in the marketplace
Selected, planned, designed and implemented construction of a $2.6m colocation in a Las Vegas Data Center for disaster recovery operations.

While at Clear Capital I supervised System and Network Specialists in Data Center Operations (Collocation, Web hosting); Network Implementations, Upgrades, and Overhauls; Disaster Planning and Recovery Consultations; and Vendor and Asset Management.

While at SBC I served as VPN subject-matter expert for the Advanced Enterprise Solutions Pre-sales Engineering Group and technical trainer for all VPN, MPLS, and Network Management Product Pre-sales. Responded to requests for proposals and provided Tier 3 Design Engineering, Design Validation, and Training for Sales Engineers on new hosting products and support procedures.