Hello M***a, I’m J***e, an HR Recruiter at StrategyBrain. I came across your profile and was impressed by your journey at e***a A***G,from Microsoft System Administrator to leading the IT team. Your expertise in Office 365, Active Directory and team management aligns well with a Senior IT Infrastructure Manager role we’re supporting at T***e S***s G***H. Would you be interested in a brief chat to learn more about this opportunity? Looking forward to your thoughts. Best regards, J***e

Hi M***a, Many thanks for your interest! I’d be happy to share more about the Senior IT Infrastructure Manager role and learn about your experience leading the IT team at e***a A***G. Would you be available for a brief 20-minute call? • Tomorrow (Tuesday) between 10:00,12:00 CEST • Wednesday between 14:00,16:00 CEST If neither works, please let me know a time that suits you. Here’s a quick overview of the opportunity at T***e S***s G***H, a mid-sized, innovation-driven managed services provider: • Lead and mentor a team of system administrators and IT support specialists to ensure reliable, secure infrastructure. • Design, implement and maintain on-premises and cloud solutions (Active Directory, Office 365, virtualization, backup). • Develop and enforce IT policies, procedures and best practices for security, compliance and performance. • Collaborate cross-functionally to support business applications and drive continuous improvement. You’ll benefit from a clear growth path (e.g. IT Director), a dedicated training budget with certification support, and a competitive salary plus bonus and stock-option incentives. We also offer flexible working arrangements and modern tooling to help you succeed. Does this align with what you’re looking for? Looking forward to your thoughts and preferred time. Best regards, J***e

Hi M***a, Perfect,11:00 CEST tomorrow is booked. I’ll send over a calendar invite shortly. Right now, our IT Infrastructure team at T***e S***s G***H comprises eight people (five system administrators and three IT support specialists). On the cloud side, we’ve built our core environment on Microsoft technologies: Office 365 for collaboration and Azure (Azure AD synced with on-prem, Azure VMs and Backup) for infrastructure. We also engage with AWS on select customer projects, though our internal platform today is primarily Azure-based. Looking forward to diving deeper tomorrow! Best, J***e

Hi M***a, Great questions! Here’s a bit more color: 1. Backup & DR for Azure VMs - We leverage Azure Backup (Recovery Services Vault) to take daily incremental snapshots and weekly full backups of all production VMs, with geo-redundant storage and retention policies aligned to our SLA. - For disaster recovery, we maintain Infrastructure-as-Code (ARM templates and PowerShell scripts) and regularly test restores in a secondary subscription. Critical workloads are also replicated using Azure Site Recovery, and we conduct quarterly failover drills to validate our process. - All backup/DR steps,checklists, who-does-what, and post-test reviews,are documented in dedicated runbooks stored in our central knowledge base. 2. Day-to-day collaboration & tooling - We use a cloud-based ITSM platform to intake, categorize and route tickets. Support specialists handle L1 requests and triage, while sysadmins pick up escalations and more complex infrastructure tasks. - Communication happens via Microsoft Teams channels (alerts, handoffs, quick questions) and a daily 15-minute stand-up to align on priorities, blockers and upcoming changes. - Our runbooks cover everything from onboarding new servers or users to incident response and patch cycles,each step is versioned in SharePoint so the whole team can follow a consistent, audited process. Hope this gives you a clear picture. Let me know if you’d like more detail on any area, otherwise I look forward to our call tomorrow at 11:00 CEST! Best, J***e

Hi M***a, Great questions,here are the details: 1. RTO/RPO SLAs - For our most critical VMs (e.g. core directory, SQL clusters), we target an RTO of 4 hours and an RPO of 1 hour. - We track these via Azure Monitor (alerts on backup health and recovery-point age) and pull the data into a central Power BI dashboard. Monthly and quarterly SLA reports are generated automatically and reviewed in our infrastructure governance meetings. 2. ITSM platform & automation - We use ServiceNow as our ITSM solution. - Within ServiceNow we’ve automated several runbook steps: • Backup verification reminders and ticket creation if snapshots fail • Automated status updates and escalations based on priority and age • Self-healing workflows for routine patch checks and disk-space cleanup using ServiceNow Flow Designer and Azure Functions Happy to dive deeper on any of these points. I look forward to our call tomorrow at 11:00 CEST! Best, J***e

Hi M***a, Here’s a concise overview: 1. Power BI Dashboard • Key visuals: , Cards for real-time RTO/RPO averages and SLA compliance percentages , Line charts showing trend of recovery-point age and restore durations over the past 30/90 days , Clustered bar chart grouping VMs by “Compliant,” “Near Breach” and “At Risk” statuses , Matrix/table view listing each critical VM, last backup timestamp, next planned snapshot and responsible owner • Filters: environment (Prod/DR/Test), region, workload type (SQL, AD, File Services) and SLA tier • Alerts: color-coded flags (green/yellow/red) drive automated Power BI alerts and email notifications when any VM edges toward its RTO/RPO threshold. 2. ServiceNow Self-Healing via Azure Functions • Patch-and-Compliance Checker: triggers nightly, runs a PowerShell script against each VM to validate OS updates; on failure, reboots or reinstalls patches and updates the ServiceNow ticket with status. • Disk-Space Cleanup: invoked when a threshold breach alert comes in; it mounts the target VM, purges temp/log files above a set size, then logs results back to the incident. • Service Health Restarter: watches for key Windows services (e.g. SQL Agent, AD replication); if down, attempts a restart and, upon persistent failure, escalates to L2 with full error details in the ticket. • Exception Handling: each Function wraps its core logic in try/catch , retries transient errors (up to three times with back-off), logs all exceptions to Azure Log Analytics, and creates or flags a ServiceNow incident for manual intervention if a critical step still fails. Given your background leading infrastructure automation at e***a A***G, I think you’ll appreciate how we tie these automations back into our ITSM processes. Happy to walk through a live demo of both the dashboard and workflows on our call tomorrow at 11:00 CEST. Let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like us to cover! Best, J***e

Hi M***a, Great questions,here’s how we handle both: 1. Power BI data pipeline • We actually use a hybrid approach: for real-time alerts and quick looks, Power BI connects directly to Log Analytics via the Azure Monitor connector. • For historical trends and to smooth refresh performance, we run a nightly Azure Data Factory job that pulls raw tables from Log Analytics into an intermediate Azure SQL staging database. Power BI then points at that store for heavy-duty reporting. 2. Azure Functions CI/CD, testing & rollback • We manage Functions in Azure DevOps pipelines: code and infrastructure (ARM templates) live in Git, feature-branch PRs trigger unit and integration tests, then deploy to a “staging” slot. • Once smoke tests pass, we swap to production. Each slot swap is versioned, so if a workflow throws an exception post-deploy, we can immediately roll back by swapping back to the previous slot. • We also bake in health-check calls and automated “circuit-breaker” logic: after three failed executions, the function flags an incident in ServiceNow, and our on-call team can review logs in Log Analytics before re-deploying. Happy to walk through the exact pipelines and demo our staging slot process on tomorrow’s call at 11:00 CEST. Looking forward to it! Best, J***e