AZURE CLOUD CONSULTANT - CR289

Azure Cloud Consultant

Blackstone Talent Group, an award-winning technology consulting and talent agency is seeking an Azure Cloud Consultant to join our client's team.

Deliverable and Tasks:

• Migrate workloads to M365.
• Migrate remaining servers and applications from the VMWare environment to Microsoft Azure.
• Deploy Nutanix virtual environments to migrate Data Center systems not included in other projects to Nutanix environments.
• Replace remote office VMWare virtual environments with Nutanix systems.
• Review and develop architecture plans for Nutanix and Azure with vendor input.
• Review and develop plans for migration activities to Nutanix and Azure in conjunction with State Fund SMEs and vendor architects.
• Coordinate with other IT teams to research and resolve complex issues.
• Provide technical guidance and resources to other IT teams as needed.
• Escalate critical issues that impact pre-production and production systems when necessary.
• Perform post-event analysis to determine root cause and possible preventive measures.
• Coordinate administrative, maintenance, and support activities of infrastructure to support IT and business initiatives.
• Lead, plan, develop, implement, and participate in project design, system administration, maintenance, and support essential to the mission of client.
• Develop automation using tools such as Ansible and Python to streamline routine tasks.
• Ensure designs meet best practice security guidelines.
• Optimize systems for performance based on their use case.
• Optimize State Fund spending in Azure to prevent overspend.
• Assist State Fund management in proactively managing vendor resources.
• Lead design discussions, research, identify, and provide recommendations on solutions and best practices to improve or resolve mission-critical systems and issues.
• Participate in problem management and root cause analysis and maintain 24x7 availability and monitoring of business system servers.
• Provide after-hours maintenance and support, whenever required.
• Participate in the on-call rotation with other Server Operations staff.

Technical Knowledge and Skills:

• Advanced knowledge of security principles and configurations for Azure, Nutanix, M365 and AVD
• Advanced knowledge of Virtualization platforms, in particular VMware, Nutanix and AVD
• Advanced knowledge of Cloud architecture, in particular Azure and AWS
• Advanced knowledge of M365 architecture including Purview
• Advanced knowledge of M365 Purview
• Advanced knowledge of Microsoft Defender/Sentinel
• Solid knowledge of Azure networking design principles.
• At least 2 years technical implementation experience with storage technologies (SAN, FCP/ISCSI and NAS)
• Thorough understanding of networking technologies, including administration of enterprise routers, switches, firewalls and load-balancers (OSI layers 4-7)
• Understanding of network security methodologies as a whole, including but not limited to: ACLs, Stateful firewalls, VPNs (tunneling, IPsec, PPTP, etc.)

Security Clearance Required: N/A Blackstone Talent Group is a wholly owned subsidiary of Blackstone Technology Group, a global IT services and software firm that implements technological solutions across commercial industry verticals and the US Federal Government. Blackstone's global talent augmentation practice was founded in 1998. Blackstone Talent Group has offices in San Francisco, Denver, Houston, Colorado Springs, and Washington, DC. We specialize in providing clients the best talent across a variety of industries and sectors. EOE of Minorities/Females/Veterans/Disabilities