I am a security and infrastructure engineer based in Dubai. For the past seven years I have built and maintained the systems organisations run on — Azure subscriptions, Windows Server estates, firewall fabrics, hypervisor clusters and the backup platforms that catch them when something fails.
Most environments I work in are not fully cloud and not fully on-premises. They are both, at the same time, with identity and data moving between them. My focus is making that boundary deliberate: Entra ID joined to on-premises Active Directory, site-to-site connectivity that holds under load, storage that lives in the right tier, and cost governance so the cloud side does not quietly grow past its value.
Security is not a phase at the end of a project. Firewall policy, segmentation, privileged access, group policy and CIS benchmark controls are part of the same design as the switch fabric and the domain. I have run FortiGate configuration audits across multi-site environments and applied Active Directory domain hardening across estates spanning four UAE emirates.
I have stood up Windows Server environments from nothing — AD DS, multi-site replication, DNS, DHCP — and I have also walked into broken ones: failed Hyper-V virtual switches, iSCSI paths that would not present, high availability that had never actually been tested. Both ends of that spectrum teach the same lesson, which is that infrastructure is only as good as its documented recovery path.
Every build I hand over comes with the operational layer: SOPs, change workflow, monitoring, retention policy and a named recovery procedure. Onboarding nine FortiGate sites into a single FortiManager plane is only useful if the next engineer can authorise device ten without calling me.
Currently Azure Cloud & Network Administrator at CADD Emirates in Dubai, UAE, owning a hybrid estate across Microsoft Azure and on-premises data centre infrastructure.
Years experience
Enterprise infrastructure, security and cloud engineering.
Estimated Azure spend reduction
Right-sizing and cost governance across Azure workloads.
Reduced manual operational effort
Through PowerShell automation of recurring administration.
Service availability
Maintained across supported production infrastructure.
Reduction in physical server footprint
VMware virtualization initiative consolidating physical hosts.
Users migrated to Microsoft 365
Full mailbox and data migration from G Suite.
Disaster recovery improvement
Redesigned backup and recovery process.
B.S. Computer Science
Lahore Garrison University · Lahore, Pakistan · 2017