Dick Frederik van Bladel

An organisation working for the Dutch Notary Association wanted to become a Trust Service Provider to provide eID services. As part of this ambition they needed to obtain eIDAS- and ETSI-certification which required a sound business continuity management system.

Project ongoing, estimated completion 03/2022

This client needed an answer to their question of where to host and run their 3 environments: in their own datacenters, in a private cloud, in the public cloud, as a SaaS or using a combination of all these.

Project ongoing, estimated completion 03/2022

A telco provider with strong ambitions to grow their IT hosting services required an objective review of their main data centers in Harare. Our assessment report provided valuable insights in how they could improve the reliability of their data centers by identifying major vulnerabilities in their infrastructure and ways to address these. We also helped improve communication between the client’s Business, IT and Engineering functions.

This bank's main IT environment was suffering from a lack of reliability and at the same the bank needed to improve its disaster recovery capabilities to meet new regulations from the Central Bank of Rwanda.

The Flemish government was moving to a new ecosystem of providers for its IT environment. I was engaged in an entreprise architect role as an extension of their internal EA practice.
Important activities in this role were:
• to help their clients (=government entities) obtain suitable solutions using the building blocks from the various providers (cloud, data center, connectivity, mainframe, workplace, applications, integration);
• to obtain a better view on client needs and… Show more

The Flemish government was moving to a new ecosystem of providers for its IT environment. I was engaged in an entreprise architect role as an extension of their internal EA practice.
Important activities in this role were:
• to help their clients (=government entities) obtain suitable solutions using the building blocks from the various providers (cloud, data center, connectivity, mainframe, workplace, applications, integration);
• to obtain a better view on client needs and expectations in order to be able to improve the product and services portfolio.
But most of my time was spent on:
• building the relationship with the providers’ architects;
• improving the collaboration between the various providers;
• building trust and streamlining the functioning of the ecosystem from an architectural perspective. Show less

‘Business Iceland’ wanted to understand the approach Norway is taking for promoting the country as a data center destination.
Main project activities:
• Preparing an overview of the development of the DC industry in Norway
• Investigating the Norwegian DC industry ecosystem
• Analysing the working of Innovation Norway
• Capturing promotion coordination content and channels
• Statement of conclusions
• Presentation of report

This was a brief engagement to support a leading consulting agency working for EQUINIX. My role was to provide data center expertise with regards to the global DC market and to provide insights on the main reasons and relevance of data center churn they were experiencing.

A governmental agency wanted to reinforce the country as a data center destination, compare the position of Iceland against Ireland and understand its specific strengths and weaknesses for attracting more data center investments.
To meet client expectations, the content of the deliverable was defined jointly with representatives from the power, telco and data center industries.
The project scope included:
• Review of the global trends influencing data center growth
• Analysis of the… Show more

A governmental agency wanted to reinforce the country as a data center destination, compare the position of Iceland against Ireland and understand its specific strengths and weaknesses for attracting more data center investments.
To meet client expectations, the content of the deliverable was defined jointly with representatives from the power, telco and data center industries.
The project scope included:
• Review of the global trends influencing data center growth
• Analysis of the Icelandic data center market today and main players’ ambitions going forward
• Impact of the new IRIS subsea fiber cable
• Analysis of Ireland as a European data center hub
• Comparing country value propositions
• Financial benchmark: building and operating a data center in Iceland vs. Ireland
• Conclusions and recommendations to improve the position of Iceland in the market
• Report presentation to the stakeholders
• Presentation of report highlights to the Icelandic government to help create a momentum for change Show less

A newly appointed IT Director needed urgent help to manage his team and ongoing projects while facing significant challenges:
• The company had been hit very hard by a ransomware attack which had brought down manufacturing for several weeks. After one full year of rebuilding, the IT team was still struggling to rebuild the complete IT and OT environments with manufacturing spread across 4 countries.
• The attack happened during an acquisition which was put on hold to allow an external… Show more

A newly appointed IT Director needed urgent help to manage his team and ongoing projects while facing significant challenges:
• The company had been hit very hard by a ransomware attack which had brought down manufacturing for several weeks. After one full year of rebuilding, the IT team was still struggling to rebuild the complete IT and OT environments with manufacturing spread across 4 countries.
• The attack happened during an acquisition which was put on hold to allow an external audit ordered by the European Commission to look into fair competition aspects. The auditor was performing an investigation into all systems looking for sensitive manufacturing, supplier and client data and required ring-fencing this data before any take-over could take place.
• Huge pressure from his internal clients who complained about the strictness of the new security rules making it difficult for them to do their daily jobs.
• Urged to reduce costs of the external consulting company that had been running large portions of the IT for more than a year since the attack. Many responsibilities had to be passed back to the already stressed IT-team.
• And then, in the midst of this all, the IT director had to lay-off his IT infrastructure manager and his lead architect without any hand-over taking place.

In my role as interim IT infrastructure manager, this project proved to be more people-centric than technical: rebuilding the IT infrastructure team (20 people) was one of my main objectives to help the IT director get things back on track.
Next to this, I focused on setting the right priorities for the infrastructure to grow into a more reliable IT and OT environment such as alignment of the infrastructure to the application criticality, the creation of a backup policy, the improvement of the backup quality and the reactivation of the yearly DR testing which had stopped due to the attack. Show less

A Cypriotic ministry was relying on another ministry for the provision of its IT services. Motivated by an initiative from the European Commission to improve the reliability of their IT services, clear agreements were required to manage the relationship between the ministries. A service level agreement had to be developed, and agreed on between both parties, describing the service catalogue, the service level objectives, the service level targets and the SLA governance.

Triggered by an IT audit, the board of directors decided to assess the state of the disaster recovery capabilities of the company. Given the criticality of the infrastructure managed by the organisation the recoverability of its ICT environment was of the utmost importance and the client wanted to have an independent review done.

This government agency had to manage 71 different types of end-user devices for its staff. While clearly in need of a more consistent end-user device policy with a reduced number of types and models, they also wanted to take advantage of the new policy to introduce more flexibility. This would allow the users to spend their budget as per their own needs and preferences, and would in turn help the organisation to be more attractive as an employer in the battle for talent. A delicate balancing… Show more

This government agency had to manage 71 different types of end-user devices for its staff. While clearly in need of a more consistent end-user device policy with a reduced number of types and models, they also wanted to take advantage of the new policy to introduce more flexibility. This would allow the users to spend their budget as per their own needs and preferences, and would in turn help the organisation to be more attractive as an employer in the battle for talent. A delicate balancing act was required to increase flexibility while reducing the number of devices. Show less

This top-3 South-African bank suffered a major outage in one of its production data centers. The disaster recovery operations didn’t go as smoothly as expected and different stories of what had happened circulated in the bank (by facilities, IT, business). They hired PwC to provide a consolidated view on what happened (root cause analysis), to understand what went wrong during the DR and to define what could be done to avoid this from happening again in the future (recommendations).

The bank was going through a transformation shifting more responsibilities from the Infrastructure team to the Application teams. They wanted to improve agility as well as reduce infrastructure cost and planned for the Application teams to own and manage their own infrastructure stack.
Before this could happen, the approximately 6000 servers needed to have clear and unique owners within the organisation. Resource usage information had to be made available allowing the teams to right-size the… Show more

The bank was going through a transformation shifting more responsibilities from the Infrastructure team to the Application teams. They wanted to improve agility as well as reduce infrastructure cost and planned for the Application teams to own and manage their own infrastructure stack.
Before this could happen, the approximately 6000 servers needed to have clear and unique owners within the organisation. Resource usage information had to be made available allowing the teams to right-size the virtual instances thus freeing up resources back into the private cloud and consequently reducing costs.
The client project sponsor was located abroad and he reached out to PwC to put a team in place to help make this change happen. The client insisted the team to be local in order to make sure to match the local culture, to help reduce resistance to the upcoming change and to overcome the ‘stickyness’ (sic) of the local organisation. Show less

This established investment holding company wanted to move away from its on-premise IT which no longer met their requirements in terms of availability and recoverability. They hired PwC to help define a new cloud-based target architecture and identify the most suitable partner for the implementation.

This bank in Kuwait lacked in-house data center expertise during the construction of their new main production data center. They hired me to be their trusted adviser and to protect their interests throughout the data center detailed design and implementation, up to testing and commissioning. The scope included multiple aspects such as architectural/structural, power provisioning, cooling, connectivity and physical security systems,

This client relied on multiple external data center providers for the housing of their business critical IT infrastructure. To gain insight into the level of security at the providers, the client engaged PwC to audit the data centers and, more specifically, to evaluate how the providers managed security during their daily operations. The outcome of the study was also intended to be used as a guideline for a possible future ISO 27001 certification.

The world’s leading provider of secure financial messaging services engaged PwC to conduct an audit of the physical security processes and controls for selected global locations. The client aims to provide a safe and secure environment for its production activities by implementing appropriate protection for staff and company assets against internal and external threats to their physical security or integrity.

The client was considering applying for ISO27001 certification for their data center and wanted to have a view on their current status and perform a certification 'dry-run' exercise.

The bank needed to rethink its data center landscape now that the company’s main data center no longer meets the requirements of the Central Bank of Kuwait.

A holding company in Dubai wanted to create a department acting as shared IT service provider for several of its, quite autonomous, subsidiaries.

This bank needed advice with their DC strategy. They were thinking of building a new data center but weren’t sure if that would be the right way forward to support their IT strategy.

This client had a large portion of their IT environment up for renewal and wanted guidance on how to move forward with the different platforms they had. At the same time they were also building a new high-rise building for their head office and they were dreaming of somehow being a IT service provider for some of their OPCO's.