Cornel Toma

Senior IT Project Manager owning a portfolio of concurrent workstreams within the Pricing Architecture technical roadmap, a multi-million-dollar transformation program for ING's global pricing platform within Wholesale Banking / Financial Markets. Scope spans application decomposition, market data ingestion redesign, enterprise observability, infrastructure modernization, analytics tooling, and regulatory compliance.

Static Data Platform Redesign: Delivered the end-to-end decomposition of a tightly coupled, monolithic static data application into a resilient, independently deployable microservices architecture, eliminating single points of failure and accelerating time-to-market.

Market Data Optimization: Deployed a unified, single-point data ingestion pipeline for critical market data services, addressing severe performance bottlenecks and production overloads. Implemented advanced, complex data filtering mechanisms within the ingestion layer, ensuring downstream trading and analytics consumers receive highly optimized, asset-class-specific data streams (e.g., FX Spot, Commodity Futures).

Enterprise Observability Platform: Managed the enterprise-wide rollout of a unified observability and monitoring platform across all critical applications in the pricing and trading ecosystem.

Database Infrastructure Migration (BMaaS): Led the migration of critical database workloads from legacy infrastructure to a high-performance Bare Metal as a Service environment. Coordinated data pipeline deployment, firewall rule replication, SQL Server setup, and end-to-end stress and performance testing.

Regulatory Compliance & API Security (DORA): Leading the design and rollout of an API intermediation layer to eliminate non-compliant direct database connections from Front Office, Trading, and Sales users, replacing them with controlled, auditable API access. Outcome: full compliance with European Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA) requirements with complete access auditability.

Delivered large-scale IT programs across global enterprise subsidiaries, aligning technical execution with corporate strategy to drive operational optimization and significant cost efficiencies:

Global Data Lifecycle & Cost Optimization Program ($10M annual cost avoidance): Managed a global program to optimize petabytes of legacy Microsoft SharePoint and Microsoft Teams storage across WPP subsidiaries. Partnered with vendor AvePoint to deploy their Opus platform for automated archiving of inactive content to Azure Blob Storage, version history cleanup, and orphaned-content remediation. Updated and standardized the company-wide retention policy to align technical execution with corporate governance requirements. Outcome: $10 million annual cost avoidance and a sustainable retention framework across the group.

GroupM Cloud Transition Program (Azure Multi-Tenant Migration & Modernization): Led cloud engineering teams through the migration and modernization of hundreds of Azure subscriptions and workloads from legacy tenants into newly deployed enterprise Azure Landing Zones, structured around Microsoft's Cloud Adoption Framework. The program spanned WPP's major operating companies across global regions. Coordinated a phased rollout from pilot through six execution phases, managing app owner engagement, subscription onboarding, RBAC and security baseline assessments, remediation tracking, and final handover.

Cloud Operating Model & Governance Design: Defined and operationalized the engagement model between operating companies and the central Cloud Hub, structuring responsibility allocation across Access Management (EntraID, Privileged Identity Management, MFA), Platform Engineering (Azure Security Baseline, CI/CD and Infrastructure-as-Code, automation), and Maintenance & Operations (patching, monitoring, backup, workload support). Outcome: clear governance boundaries between agency-managed and centrally-managed workloads, enabling consistent service delivery

Owned end-to-end delivery and international rollout of StudioGo, a custom-built enterprise hybrid-work platform managing seat reservations, meeting rooms, floor mapping with real-time occupancy, and team scheduling across Cognizant's global hubs. Led a 16-person cross-functional team of front-end, back-end, UX, and QA engineers from initial Proof of Concept through full production scaling.

Led the initiative from a rapidly designed and implemented Proof of Concept (PoC) to a fully scaled, highly available deployment across multiple international corporate hubs. Managed the full product lifecycle: scope definition, sprint planning, backlog governance, release management, user feedback integration, and post-deployment iteration.

Managed the migration of the application core scheduling and authentication from Google Workspace to a Microsoft 365 / Active Directory including authentication, calendar and Teams integration.

Positioned the platform as a strategic enabler of Cognizant's hybrid work model, providing leadership with data-driven visibility into office utilization, occupancy patterns, and team co-location to support capacity planning and operational decision-making.