Technical Specialist (Implementation) @ InterContinental Hotels Group

Over the 8 years I was involved in designing, configuring, troubleshooting, and re-configuring many Cisco routers and ASA firewalls for WAN connections from hotels back to the main IHG network. I liaised with various customers and 3rd parties in order to correctly determine the solution required and the configuration needed. In total we had around 100 site-to-site VPNs, 6 CheckPoint firewalls, 250 WAN routers and around 1000 Cisco switches, which I administered. These required static and BGP routing updates, rule changes and auditing, and a knowledge of MPLS networks as new services were required.
I wrote a searchable website for our internal Software Repository in ASP, and created several custom VBScript, PowerShell and batch files to fix problems, monitor internal systems and configure user settings. I was also one of the escalation points for the 3rd line technical support team.
During the Exchange 5.5 decommissioning, I wrote a process to create an equivalent to the Global Address List from an Active Directory export which was filtered and imported into OpenLDAP.
I also helped in a global roll out of F5 Big-IP devices to provide SSO and fail-over for our extranet.
For the last 4 years I was heavily involved in helping 2 corporate offices and 86 hotels gain PCI-DSS v1.2 and v2 compliance, which included helping local IT Managers get their own hotels compliant and offering guidance. This included analysing reports from vulnerability scans, re-mediating issues and producing security documentation.
In the last year I changed teams and visited various hotels around the UK and Europe to help migrate them from “Managed” status to “Franchised”, or vice-versa, and re-install servers after security incidents or for upgrades.
In 2014 I was heavily involved in testing Windows 7. I travelled to various UK and European sites to install Windows 7 and 2008/2012 with new hardware, and travelled to hotels to help with application, network and server hardware upgrades.
As part of our goal of being ITIL compliant, I documented the process for doing various installation tasks which are now being used as standards to follow.
In 2013 I spent several weeks helping design, and then configure the hardware and software at a flagship hotel in Davos, Switzerland. This involved being on-site for 2½ weeks to complete the installation.
My manager frequently mentioned (and was pleased!) that I was the “go to” person for other colleagues in the same department, including the helpdesk and corporate infrastructure teams.
In 2015 I was the project co-ordinator for a Point Of Sale upgrade to further secure our hotels.
For the last 4 years I was appointed as one of the fire marshals for the department.