Jamal Azza

Infrastructure, platform and cybersecurity lead for one of Morocco's largest industrial groups (energy, fuel distribution, real estate, telecom) — 80+ sites, 3,000 users, 220 VMs, team of 10.

VMware → Proxmox migration: Led the exit from VMware for 220 production VMs and 100 TB across two datacenters (Broadcom-driven). Zero business-hours impact. Saves ~2M MAD / year (~$200K USD) in licensing.

AI-driven security modernization: Replaced a legacy ELK SIEM with CrowdStrike Falcon XDR + MSSP SOC

over 3,000 endpoints (2025). Hybrid WAF combining Cloudflare Enterprise externally and OpenAppSec (ML-based) internally.

Microsoft AD Tiering: Implemented Tier 0 / 1 / 2 model across 3,000 users, 2 forests, 3 domains in response to the MENA ransomware wave. Hardened 30 Tier-0 assets, eliminated lateral-movement vectors, shrank credential-theft blast radius.

Fortinet SD-WAN rollout to 80 sites — replacing legacy MPLS with secure direct-internet breakouts and a unified WAN + security fabric.

ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certification — drove end-to-end: gap assessment, ISMS, Statement of Applicability, risk treatment, successful Stage 1 & 2 audits.

Containerization: Stood up multi-cluster Kubernetes across dev / staging / prod with 30+ workloads — standardized base images, RBAC, namespaces, pod-security, self-service deploys for app teams.

CI/CD standardization: Built pipelines across multiple app teams — build, test, SAST / secret scanning, policy-gated K8s deploys. Faster releases, audit-ready for ISO 27001.

Observability stack: Prometheus + Grafana, Datadog, Zabbix for legacy fleets — unified dashboards feeding both SRE response and SOC visibility, closing the infra-to-security telemetry gap.

AI-augmented engineering: Integrated Claude Code and LLM tooling into daily workflow for Ansible, IaC, Python / Bash automation, runbooks and security documentation. Measurable cycle-time reduction on hands-on work.

Led the technical organization of an IT services firm — 15 engineers delivering infrastructure projects and offensive security (penetration testing) for enterprise customers across oil & gas, food industry, and customs / public sector. Owned the penetration testing practice — executing engagements hands-on and overseeing the team across external, internal, and web-application scopes. Delivered enterprise infrastructure projects across customer industries — datacenter design, virtualization, network modernization, Active Directory hardening. Owned pre-sales scoping, delivery quality, and post-engagement client retention.

Owned IT strategy and operations for a Moroccan plastics manufacturer. Led a team of 4 covering infrastructure, end-user computing, and telephony.

VDI deployment: Migrated from traditional desktops to a full VMware Horizon VDI environment for 80 users — standardized end-user computing, hardened security posture (centralized data, hardened images), reduced endpoint management overhead.