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Andrew Downing

@andrewdowning

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I lead national IT infrastructure, cloud migration, networking, and support operations across six South African sites.

South Africa

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What I'm looking for

I'm looking for a senior hands-on IT leadership role where I can own infrastructure and support operations while staying close to the technical environment.

At FAW Vehicle Manufacturers South Africa, I lead IT infrastructure and support operations for 350 users and 600 endpoint devices across six sites. I designed the national MPLS network, implemented VLAN and QoS frameworks, and migrated SAP, Sage, HR, and server workloads to Huawei Cloud.

I manage Microsoft 365, Active Directory, Hyper-V, firewalls, VPN connectivity, PBX and SIP trunking, while leading a three-person support function. I also manage vendors, audits, asset lifecycles, and R10 million in annual IT budgets, including an in-house telephony transition that reduced costs by approximately 80%.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Systems Administrator

Current

FAW Vehicle Manufacturers South Africa

Dec 2018 - Present (7 years 9 months)

Lead day-to-day IT infrastructure and support operations for approximately 350 users and 600 endpoint devices across 6 sites. Designed and implemented a national MPLS network, led cloud migration to Huawei Cloud, and manage service desk processes with 1-hour critical and 24-hour non-critical targets.

MPLS BGP VLAN Microsoft 365 Active Directory Hyper V Firewalls IPSEC OpenVPN VoIP SIP Trunking Freshdesk IT Governance Vendor Management Procurement IT Asset Management

Network Engineer

Entelek IT Services (Pty) Ltd

Jun 2016 - Dec 2018 (2 years 6 months)

Designed and implemented Layer 2 branch connectivity and BGP/MPLS network environments. Deployed clustered Microsoft Server 2012 R2 environments with virtualised workloads and managed VLAN configuration, VoIP systems, and national remote support.

BGP MPLS VLAN Virtualisation VoIP Remote Support