London, UK · Available for Consulting

Vishal
Vashisht

MCIIS  ·  MBCS  ·  ISC2 CC

Senior Enterprise Architect  ·  Head of Infrastructure  ·  Technology Leader

Cyber Resilience  ·  Hybrid Cloud  ·  Infrastructure  ·  Enterprise Architecture  ·  Data & AI

I lead infrastructure, architecture and technology decisions because I understand both board-level risk and the engineering reality beneath it. I help organisations modernise, secure and govern complex technology estates across infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, data and AI. A London-based senior technology leader with a track record of delivering nationally critical platforms — £4M+ in documented cost savings, 13× platform scaling for the NHS COVID response, and programmes for UK Government, the Metropolitan Police and NHS England. Having previously held interim IT Manager roles through my contracting and led infrastructure teams on large-scale programmes, I pair board-level perspective with real delivery credibility.

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Vishal Vashisht — Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Architect, London

01 / Profile

Who I am &
what I do

A cross-domain architect and technical leader with a foundation built through years of hands-on engineering — spanning on-premises datacentre design and server room builds through to modern cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, OCI). Architecture decisions here carry the weight of someone who has actually done the physical work: racked the hardware, run the cabling, and designed the security layers that sit beneath it. That combination of on-premises depth and cloud fluency is increasingly rare, and increasingly sought after. Across two decades of contracting I have also stepped into interim IT Manager roles and led infrastructure teams on large-scale programmes — comfortable owning both the technical direction and the people delivering it.

Architecture practice spans infrastructure, security, cloud, data, and solutions — with deep experience in hybrid cloud (AWS, Azure, OCI), Zero Trust security models, identity architecture, and modern data platforms (Databricks, Snowflake, Fabric). Two years of dedicated AI upskilling covering agentic workflows, MLOps design, and AI governance under ISO/IEC 42001.

Full Member of the Chartered Institute of Information Security (CIISEC) and the British Computing Society (BCS). Volunteering with CIISEC delivering assessments for membership. Working towards CISSP, Chartered IT Professional (CITP) and Chartered in Cybersecurity (ChCSP).

SFIA Profile

Enterprise & Security Architect — primarily Level 6 (Initiate & Influence) with selected Level 7 strategic responsibilities

£4M+

Documented cost savings through architectural redesign — including £4M Oracle DB licence redesign at MPS and £3M data centre migration saving at Haringey Council

13×

Platform scaling at NHS England during COVID-19 — coordinating infrastructure installation alongside engineers and military personnel at the Nightingale Hospital

3

Nationally critical programmes delivered on time: UK Cabinet Office, NHS England & Improvement, Metropolitan Police Service

02 / Leadership

How I
lead

I lead from the point where technology strategy, delivery, governance and people meet.

My background combines hands-on engineering credibility with senior architecture, stakeholder management and programme leadership. I can work with engineers on detailed design decisions, suppliers on delivery risk, and senior leaders on investment cases, trade-offs and operational readiness.

I have led technical teams, acted as infrastructure technical authority, managed vendors, shaped delivery standards and presented complex technology decisions to senior and executive stakeholders.

Typical areas of leadership

Infrastructure strategy and roadmap ownership.

Technical leadership across cloud, datacentre, cybersecurity, identity and resilience programmes.

Executive stakeholder engagement and board-level communication.

Supplier and vendor governance across major technology programmes.

Engineering standards, design assurance and delivery governance.

Team mentoring, technical direction and capability development.

Cost reduction through better architecture, licensing decisions, platform rationalisation and cloud cost optimisation (FinOps).

Decision-making in ambiguous, high-pressure or greenfield environments.

My leadership style is pragmatic, calm and evidence-led. I focus on making technology decisions understandable, deliverable and defensible.

Roles I am best aligned to

Senior / Lead Infrastructure Architect

For organisations modernising hybrid infrastructure, cloud foundations, datacentres, networking, identity, resilience and cybersecurity controls.

Enterprise Architect

For organisations needing cross-domain architecture across infrastructure, security, cloud, data, AI, operating models, governance and technology strategy.

Head of Infrastructure

For organisations needing leadership across infrastructure strategy, cloud platforms, cyber resilience, vendor management, engineering standards, cost control and operational maturity. With proven experience leading teams.

Director of IT / Technology Consultant

For organisations needing senior advisory, transformation leadership, board-level communication, pragmatic technology decision-making and delivery assurance.

03 / Architecture

Architecture
& design

I design technology estates that are secure, resilient, governable and deliverable.

My architecture work spans infrastructure, cloud, cybersecurity, data, AI, identity and operational resilience. I work across enterprise, solution and infrastructure architecture, connecting strategic intent — including operating-model, IT and digital transformation goals — with the engineering reality needed to deliver it.

I am strongest in complex, regulated environments where architecture decisions must account for legacy systems, cloud adoption, regulatory pressure, supplier constraints, operational risk and cost. I am at my best breaking down silos between technical teams and working closely with the business to turn competing priorities into aligned, high-impact results.

Typical areas of work

Enterprise architecture governance and technical assurance.

Infrastructure and cloud strategy across AWS, Azure, OCI and hybrid estates.

Target-state architecture for cloud migration, datacentre modernisation and platform transformation.

Identity, IAM, PAM and Zero Trust architecture.

Architecture review of HLDs, LLDs, supplier designs and migration plans.

Data and AI platform architecture, including guardrails, governance and security considerations.

Business continuity and disaster recovery, with infrastructure resilience design.

Technical roadmaps that balance ambition, cost, risk and delivery reality.

Selected outcomes include £4M+ in documented cost savings through architectural redesign, 13× infrastructure scaling during the NHS COVID-19 response, and nationally critical platform delivery across UK Government, the Metropolitan Police and NHS England.

Technical Breadth

Platforms, tools & standards I work across

A working selection — not an exhaustive list. Evidence of the breadth a senior architect is expected to govern.

Cloud

AWS Azure Oracle OCI M365 Exchange Online Express Route Direct Connect Hybrid Cloud

Cybersecurity

Zero Trust / ZTNA CASB SIEM / SOAR Palo Alto Cortex CrowdStrike FortiGate MS Sentinel MS Purview PKI CIS Hardening Darktrace XDR EDR Observability Patching

Virtualisation & Containers

VMware vSphere VMware VCF NSX Nutanix Hyper-V Citrix VDI Kubernetes Docker Red Hat OpenShift

Networking

SD-WAN SASE MPLS BGP Cisco / Meraki F5 / Kemp LB Zscaler Netskope CATO Juniper Alta Labs Global Load Balancing Microsegmentation VMware NSX Nutanix Flow Subnetting IPv4 / IPv6

Server Hardware & Physical Layer

HPE Dell Lenovo Cisco UCS Rack Design Ethernet Cabling Fibre Cabling SFPs Physical Installations Datacentre Logistics

On-Premises & Datacentre

Rack Design Power Budgeting UPS / PDU Spec Hot/Cold Aisle CRAC / CRAH Structured Cabling Server Room Build Datacentre Migration Crown Hosting Microsegmentation

Identity & Access

Active Directory Entra ID OKTA PAM MFA / FIDO OAuth / SAML Cisco DUO One Identity

Data & AI

Databricks Snowflake MS Fabric MSSQL / Oracle DB MLOps Agentic AI LLM / RAG ISO/IEC 42001 ETL Pipelines Data Lake Data Governance AI Security Nutanix AI NVIDIA Hardware

DevOps & IaC

GitHub / GitLab CI/CD Pipelines Terraform Pulumi Ansible DevSecOps JIRA / Confluence

Languages

Python PowerShell SQL YAML pySpark pandas SwiftUI

Frameworks & Standards

TOGAF NIST ISO 27001 ISO/IEC 42001 MITRE ATT&CK NIS2 DORA ITIL AGILE C4 Model SFIA L6/L7

04 / Infrastructure

Hybrid Infrastructure, Cloud Foundations & AI-Ready Platforms

Infrastructure strategy  ·  hybrid & cloud  ·  resilience  ·  local AI

I came up through the engineering — racking, cabling and commissioning real datacentre estates — and that is exactly what my architecture and leadership are now built on. Having done the physical work, I now lead the decisions above it: what to run where, what to modernise, and how to weigh commercial, operational and resilience trade-offs across physical, virtual and cloud.

That foundation spans government, NHS, policing, financial services, publishing, architecture, airports, MSPs and Crown Hosting environments — greenfield builds, zero-downtime migrations and infrastructure worth tens of millions, alongside several interim IT Manager roles. Today I bring it to hybrid and cloud strategy, where sound decisions about what to move, keep or modernise depend on genuinely understanding what you are moving from.

The renewed interest in on-premises and hybrid infrastructure is a practical response to data sovereignty, AI inference economics and cloud licensing — and organisations increasingly need leaders fluent in both worlds.

Datacentre & Infrastructure Design

Own the design of datacentre and server-room estates — capacity, power and space strategy, resilience topology, and the standards facilities and engineering teams build to. Grounded in having done the build, now directed at architecture level.

Rack Design Structured Cabling Floor Loading Crown Hosting Greenfield DC Datacentre Migration

Power & Cooling

Set the capacity and resilience envelope — power budgeting, UPS/PDU topology (N+1, 2N) and thermal strategy, including the concentrated heat loads of GPU-dense AI hardware. The decisions that shape cost, uptime and headroom.

UPS / PDU Spec Hot/Cold Aisle CRAC / CRAH Power Budgeting Thermal Design ATS / Generator

On-Premises Security & Microsegmentation

Zero Trust does not stop at the cloud. I architect on-premises microsegmentation (VMware NSX, hardware-enforced boundaries), IAM/PAM and network segmentation that blocks lateral movement across the estate — a layer cloud-native architects rarely cover.

Microsegmentation IAM / PAM VMware NSX Zero Trust On-Prem Physical Access Zoning

Local AI Infrastructure

As data sovereignty and inference economics pull AI back on-premises, I architect local GPU platforms — sizing, private inference endpoints, RAG on local data and converged stacks like Nutanix GPT-in-a-Box — bringing private AI within reach of mid-market organisations.

Local LLM Deployment GPU Infrastructure Private AI Inference Nutanix AI Data Sovereignty

Virtualisation & Hypervisor Expertise

Hypervisor strategy & large-scale migrations

Twenty-five years across the VMware arc — ESX, vSphere, vSAN, NSX and Cloud Foundation — delivering virtualisation estates for the NHS, the Metropolitan Police, financial services and central and local government. Through the post-Broadcom shift I lead hypervisor strategy and large-scale migrations, including VMware-to-Nutanix AHV programmes and Hyper-V assessments in cost-constrained environments, architecting the patterns that move production workloads between platforms with no service disruption. VCP, NCP and NCM certified.

These are programme-level decisions as much as technical ones — spanning licensing models, hardware compatibility, patching and firmware strategy, and the operating practices infrastructure teams depend on. I pair that with workload-level security: NSX and Nutanix Flow microsegmentation, tenancy isolation and in-cluster Zero Trust enforcement across hybrid physical and virtual estates.

VMware vSphere / vSAN VMware VCF VMware NSX VCP Certified Nutanix AHV Nutanix Flow Nutanix AI NCP / NCM Certified Hyper-V Hypervisor Migration Patching & Firmware Microsegmentation Tenancy Isolation Kubernetes Bare Metal Kubernetes Kubernetes Security Hybrid Environments

05 / Cyber Resilience

Cyber
resilience

I help organisations build secure and resilient technology foundations — not just add security controls after the fact.

My cybersecurity work is rooted in infrastructure, identity, governance and operational reality. I design security into cloud platforms, datacentres, networks, identity systems, backup strategies and delivery processes, so that resilience becomes part of how the organisation operates.

I work across Zero Trust, IAM, PAM, cloud security, disaster recovery, regulatory readiness and security governance, with experience in public sector, policing, healthcare, financial services and AI-focused environments.

Typical areas of work

Zero Trust, IAM, PAM and privileged access governance.

Infrastructure-layer security across cloud, datacentre, network and endpoint estates.

Cyber resilience and business continuity, with disaster recovery review.

Security architecture for AWS, Azure, OCI, VMware, Nutanix and hybrid platforms.

ISO 27001, ISO 42001, NIST, DORA and NIS2-aligned governance.

AI security and data protection, guardrails and emerging platform risk.

Backup, recovery and ransomware resilience strategy.

Security assurance for suppliers, SaaS platforms and critical infrastructure dependencies.

My focus is security that can be operated, audited and sustained. The goal is not simply compliance, but a technology estate that can withstand failure, attack, change and growth.

06 / Experience

Professional record

2024 – Present

London, UK

Phat Monkey IT Ltd

Director

  • —Advised senior stakeholders on cyber resilience, backup strategy, business continuity and infrastructure risk across Nutanix, Rubrik, Cisco and hybrid infrastructure environments
  • —Helped an AI startup achieve ISO 27001 and ISO 42001 certification
  • —Established DevSecOps and CI/CD foundations for smaller organisations, improving delivery discipline, security visibility and repeatability across GitHub, GitLab and cloud-adjacent workflows
  • —AI architecture upskilling: agentic workflows, MLOps design (Azure Copilot Studio, AWS SageMaker), ISO/IEC 42001 governance, EU Cyber Resilience Act
  • —Pursuing CISSP, CISM, C|CISO; working towards Chartered IT Professional and Chartered in Cybersecurity

2000 – 2024

London, UK

Prior Contract Engagements

Senior Architect & Engineer

Experience spans the NHS during COVID-19, Metropolitan Police, Central and Local Government, as well as banking and financial services, pension funds, publishing, universities, airports, MSPs, and commercial startups — across the UK and in senior engineering and architecture positions on programmes worth tens of millions of pounds.

  • —Redesigned a critical enterprise database architecture, saving a programme £4 million in licensing — identified and implemented independently, without external direction
  • —Architected a data centre migration at one-third the cost of the proposed cloud alternative, delivering a £3 million saving — funded after personally presenting the business case to executive leadership
  • —Scaled nationally critical infrastructure 13× during the COVID-19 pandemic response — operating without PM or project lead support, including the logistics of £5M of hardware across greenfield datacentres
  • —Upon conclusion of one engagement, the volume of work previously delivered by a single contractor required a 10-strong ATOS engineering team to maintain — a direct measure of the scope and depth of what was built
  • —Rapid licensing audit yielding a £50,000 immediate saving; platform virtualisation migration saving a further £100,000+ on licensing
  • —Provided architecture leadership across AWS, Oracle Cloud, IAM, disaster recovery and partner access for a central government cloud migration involving MOD, policing and government stakeholders
  • —Served as Infrastructure Technical Authority and team lead on nationally critical policing programmes; managed teams of up to 8 engineers, led accreditation and security compliance
  • —Migrated live pandemic big data workloads to a Crown Hosting environment with zero PM support; contributed to the Nightingale Hospital build alongside military personnel

07 / Credentials

Qualifications & credentials

View all badges on Credly

Professional Membership

  • Full Member — CIISEC (MCIIS)
  • Member — British Computing Society (MBCS)
  • ISC2 Certified in Cybersecurity (CC)
  • In progress: CISSP · CISM · C|CISO · CITP · ChCSP

Cloud Platforms

  • AWS Solutions Architect — Associate
  • MS Cybersecurity Architect Expert (SC-100)
  • MS Security Operations Analyst (SC-200)
  • MS Security, Compliance & Identity (SC-900)
  • MS Fabric Analytics Engineer (DP-600)
  • OCI Foundations Associate · AI Foundations · GenAI Professional

Virtualisation

  • VMware VCF Administrator (2V0-17.25)
  • VMware VCP-DV 2021
  • Nutanix NCP — Multi Cloud Infrastructure 6.10
  • Nutanix NCM — Multi Cloud Infrastructure 6.10
  • Nutanix NCP — Artificial Intelligence 6

Data, AI & Security

  • Cyera Certified DSPM Architect
  • Cyera Certified Security for AI Fundamentals
  • Proofpoint AI Agent Security Specialist
  • Databricks Platform Administrator & Architect
  • Linux Foundation — EU Cyber Resilience Act (LFEL1001)
  • Zscaler Zero Trust Fundamentals · Netskope SASE
  • Kafka Fundamentals — Confluent Cloud

Networking

  • Juniper JNCIA-DC
  • CATO Networks & Netskope — various training certifications
  • Previously held: Cisco CCNA  ·  Checkpoint CCSA (expired)

Education

BSc (Hons) Computing & Management

Loughborough University

Professional References

"Vishal is an outstanding consultant and tech lead. He brings deep expertise across virtualisation, infrastructure, data centre operations, and cybersecurity, and consistently connects the dots between technical detail and the bigger operational picture."

Lead Data Engineer — Mastek

"Vish was a key member of my team, helping to deliver a critical programme. He worked closely with internal project members, third party suppliers and customers — ensuring they understood the technical lens in a clear and thorough manner. Highly recommended."

Principal Technical Architect — UK Cabinet Office

"Vish has a wealth of skills and abilities and has been a real asset to the team. He was a key member when NHSE established the first Nightingale Hospital in London in response to COVID-19, coordinating IT infrastructure alongside engineers and military personnel."

Deputy Director, Infrastructure — NHS England & Improvement

All references verifiable on LinkedIn · linkedin.com/in/vishalvashisht