Alaa Alistwany

Lead enterprise IT operations and ITSM service delivery supporting a multi-company North America environment. Manage internal engineers and a large MSP organization to ensure reliable services, strong governance, and exceptional end-user outcomes. - Lead and mentor a blended organization of 7 internal engineers and 45+ MSP contractors delivering multi-tier end-user and infrastructure support. - Oversee daily ITSM execution, including triage, escalation, and quality resolution across EUC, infrastructure, and platform operations. - Publish daily/weekly/monthly dashboards for leadership to monitor SLO/KPI performance and drive continual improvement. - Senior escalation owner for priority incidents impacting productivity and enterprise availability. - Optimized enterprise storage/retention strategy, avoiding unnecessary expansion and saving millions in projected upgrade costs. - Hired and led a new virtualization team and reactivated critical infrastructure initiatives paused for 2+ years. - Led mailflow migration, moving 500+ mailboxes from on-prem Exchange to Office 365, improving uptime and security posture. - Own operations for O365, AD/Azure AD, virtualization, storage, and backup/DR with stable performance and secure change control. - Manage annual OPEX forecasting and vendor/MSP performance across Microsoft, Dell EMC, Pure Storage, Mimecast, Broadcom, and multiple MSPs.

Owned end-to-end service delivery and global support performance across multi-client MSP operations. - Directed combined Service Desk, NOC, and Engineering organization; led recruiting, onboarding, scheduling, coaching, and performance management. - Established and monitored SLAs/SLOs and operational KPIs; implemented structured continual service improvement across clients. - Increased client satisfaction by ~40% through improved triage, escalations, proactive maintenance, and knowledge management. - Led onboarding/service design for new customers including discovery, asset onboarding, endpoint standards, and knowledge transfer. - Advanced ITSM maturity using ServiceNow, Freshservice, and ConnectWise Manage. - Senior escalation point for Windows/Mac endpoints, O365/Azure, AD/DNS, virtualization, backup/DR, EDR, and enterprise networks. - Managed vendor coordination and customer success roadmaps to reduce incident load and strengthen adoption.

Built and stabilized IT support capability for a rapidly scaling multi-site organization. - Designed end-user support services for all locations; served as primary escalation and IT readiness leader. - Partnered with HR to establish a full new-hire onboarding lifecycle (accounts, equipment procurement/configuration/shipping, training). - Implemented service desk tooling/process improvements and scaled staff to meet growth.

- Delivered Tier 2 remote/onsite end-user and infrastructure support across enterprise customers. - Monitored environments using PRTG and PagerDuty; administered Hyper-V/ESXi virtualization and Veeam/Datto backup systems. - Supported large WFH rollouts and endpoint security hardening.

- Monitoring and reporting of IT systems performance. - Assisting with resolving a wide range of IT issues, including printing, operating systems, networking, and applications. - Installing and configuring PCs and laptops, Marinating user requirements, escalating issues to the correct team.

A key achievement was to establish business unit-wide IT strategies, policies, and SOPs as well as departmental and individual KPI. I also collaborated with key, strategic vendors. For example, I partnered with Microsoft to design a cloud-based disaster recovery site using Microsoft Azure, StorSimple, and site-to-site VPN tunnels. Other key accomplishments included: - Defined and finalized the managed services contract with the supplier. - Transformed the datacenter from on-site to a hybrid, migrating emails to Exchange Online and Office365 and managing systems with Active Directory, including users, licenses, subscriptions, VMs, and system health. - Managed FIFA Club World Cup 2017/2018 and AFC UAE 2019: o Partnered with FIFA and AFC IT teams, coordinating the infrastructure upgrade for 8 nationally dispersed stadiums to support tens of thousands of users with different security, bandwidth, and services with a variety of carriers. - Designed end-user support strategies, creating comprehensive technical solutions and negotiating with vendors on pricing. - Established the IT budget, obtaining Director-level approval as well as preparing and presenting the final post-project report. - Performed staff management activities for IT personnel, including hiring, training, and performance evaluations. - Planned and implemented IT requirements for festivals and concerts, including the Abu Dhabi Science Festival, National Day, Eminem, Madonna, Rihanna, Metallica, and more. - Monitored network performance, updating the configuration of Cisco routers/switches, ASA, Cisco Call Manager and Cisco wireless controllers. - Worked with the Business Continuity team to fulfill all IT requirement for BCM and risk management projects.

In this role, I provided IT management at the corporate level with advice on IT strategies, policies, and procedures. Based on these discussions, I was able to align - Established an IT roadmap, collaborating with Procurement on equipment needs, annual maintenance contracts, and licenses. - Tracked IT assets, managing the documentation - Installed and managed multi-site networks for +100 users, including troubleshooting and resolving client issues. - Worked with a wide range of technology, including VPN connections, Nortel NAT and firewall, Cisco and HP switches, Cirtex servers, Primavera Expedition Server based on SQL Enterprise, print servers, and NAS drives.

- Installed and configured PCs and laptops, troubleshooting IT issues, including peripherals and the print and wireless network. - Maintained user requirements, fielding, tracking, and escalating issues as needed.